June 2007 Archives

Wow, serious heatwave hit here this week. Or maybe it's just me. The humidity is killing me. I feel bad for all people who were waiting on line for the iPhone for its highly anticipated launch. Not everyone wants an iPhone, but some people are a little giddy (and like the publicity). Truthfully, if I could withstand the heat and my boss let me, I'd do it for the fame too -- and I'd go to San Fran where the action is though. Ah well, I'll be California bound in two months anyway. :)

eBay Ads Return, Organic Rankings Drop

Earlier this week, the eBay advertisements returned to Google after the little fight between the two started settling. Google AdWords advertisers were enjoying the increased exposure and aren't happy, but maybe there's a concession: organic listings have dropped, or so some are reporting these findings. Is this payback? eBay realized it didn't need Google AdWords, and now Google is realizing it doesn't need eBay ranked so high in the SERPs. Maybe Google is now giving small business advertisers on lower SEO campaign budgets a chance. It's indeed possible, and I know that business owners would welcome it.

Just Crazy When You Think About It

Every day, a quarter of Google searches are seen by the search engine logs that have never been seen before. After thinking about it, I wonder if that includes different permutations and long tail searches. Either way, that's crazy! Then again, it could also be related ot novelty. When American Idol hits season 7, you'll start searching for the new aspiring singers too. Dennis Ray Nestor Jr. comments that it might be related to people using Google as a spellchecker. That could be the case, but I'd think with the number of searches done daily, they'd have exhausted their typo pool by now!

Threadwatch: Going, Going, Gone

Aaron Wall of Threadwatch announced earlier this week that he was closing down the site. A lot of people have been talking about this and nobody is really happy to see it go. In fact, the activity on Threadwatch seems to have remained the same or perhaps has even increased in the past 3 days. However, the right hand navigation is gone and only the stories remain, so Threadwatch looks like it has turned into an informational site that will no longer be updated. Sad. Best of luck, Aaron.

Google Personalized Search Doesn't Have to be Personalized

Google Personalized Search freaks a lot of people out. Others, not so much. Barry wrote a nice post earlier this week allowing you to see how you can opt out of personalized search: log out of Google, append &pws=0 to the end of your search, or utilize this Joost de Valk OpenSearch Plugin. You can do the same thing for Barry's browser of choice: Safari. Philipp Lenssen also has written a good blog post on disabling personalized search.

Microsoft Shapes Up Search and Advertising

Earlier this week, we reported on a BusinessWeek article that highlights some of Microsoft's recent aquisitions in vertical search. It looks like they're going on the mobile route, but they're also focused on health care.

And yesterday, Microsoft rolled out ContentAds to all advertisers. Remember, if you're an advertiser, you need to opt out manually! Don't say we didn't warn you. :)

Google Docs and Maps are Red HOT!

Google Docs launched a new interface earlier this week. It looks really nice. I think the user friendly GUI should attract more users. What do you say?

Also, this is something I've wanted for quite a long time. I'm totally dependent the path Google Maps plots out for me for driving directions. But what happens if there's a road closure when it rains? I've always wanted to know how to get home when there's an unanticipated detour. Following the flow of traffic all the time isn't always ideal. Sometimes I find myself in dark alleys and it can be rather frightening. So now that Google has launched drag and drop driving directions, I can find my way home again... I hope. (Does Google plot dark alleys on its map?!)

Hate Your Competitors? Trash Them!

Rankings are everything to some. They really can make or break a company. That's why there are companies that can ensure you stay on top while your competitors get ranked lower. Does it sound too good to be true? Sign up today and find out! (P.S. This is not an endorsement at all. Please take everything I say with a grain of salt.)

And Network Solutions is banking on the top ranking idea and is looking for you to get guaranteed rankings for your keywords without doing anything malicious. If Barry is going to try it, why can't you?

Get MySpaceTV Today!

MySpaceTV officially launched yesterday, and we compared it to YouTube. All in all, it's pretty similar. There are some differences like the ranking system and the comments. Many people believe that there's potential for this service, but most are of the opinion that YouTube will still stay #1.

Condo for Sale in Monsey, NY

Barry is leaving us. He's moving next door to Danny in Search Engine Land, which is located somewhere in the United Kingdom. His condo is for sale in Monsey. If you buy the apartment, you also automatically buy the job vacancy that Barry has left behind. Please (only people I like) move in and jump on this excellent opportunity.

Okay, I'm totally kidding. Barry is staying with us but he would like to move to bigger digs in the New York area. I am jealous. So, if you know anyone looking for an apartment in Monsey, contact him please. Tell him I sent you. I get a 6% commission on the sale.

Give It Up

Guess what next week is, my friends? Besides Independence Day in the US, it is the day that our embargo for the Give It Up session at SMX. I know you've been waiting for it!

Matt McGee recently posted on Cre8asite Forums asking how long a 302 redirect should stay in place -- because if it's there for too long, he is afraid that search engines will see the redirect as a permanent 301 redirect.

I almost blogged about this question on Search Engine Roundtable the day he asked that question, but I held off for more commentary, and the impatient Matt decided to bring the question to his blog.

Well, thanks Matt, but I was watching out for you. :)

In any event, moderator eKstreme writes in to say that it should be treated as temporary and if search engines didn't do so, they'd be breaking HTTP protocol.

The HTTP/1.1 specification says nothing about long-duration 302s being treated as permanent. As such, an behavior along these lines is actually breaking the standard. If any of the search engines actually behave like this, it would be the first time I hear of them breaking HTTP protocol. It's very unlikely they're doing this.

Does anyone have any better insight? Let's help Matt out!

And Matt, the following coverage on 301 vs. 302 redirects might also help you out.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

A business owner at WebmasterWorld noticed that he has been getting an increase of sales lately which seems to be predominantly because online auction listings, which were ranked higher in the Google SERPs, are now not as visible. The auction rankings seem to have dropped.

Members speculate that this may have something to do with the recent eBay versus Google advertising campaign gone wrong. Perhaps now this is a Google experiment on relevancy.

Either way, business owners are happy to hear that this is occurring.

That sounds like good news -- much better search results for the end-user, who was often getting expired auction pages. I do see some action like this -- not universal, but still a good tweak.

Those sites have their own marketing plans which shouldn't involve natural search results.

Have any small business owners been noticing any change of rankings (and increased sales/traffic) as a result of this?

[Thanks Ogletree!]

Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A Search Engine Watch Forums post by Discovery alerts the community to the official launch of MSN ContentAds, which occurred yesterday. Every advertiser has now been pulled into the service.

As Barry mentioned earlier, you must opt out manually. To do so, Discovery has provided the following steps:

* Click the Campaigns tab.
* To change the settings for specific campaigns, select the check boxes next to those campaigns.
* Click Bulk edit.
* In the Edit settings for multiple campaigns section, from the Campaign settings drop-down list, select Content distribution, and click Apply.

Discovery also provides additional tips on separating your content ad keywords from your keywords for search or for combining them.

Tips for managing MSN ContentAds and discussion can be found at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I prefer to drive from my office to Newark airport a different route then the driving directions on MapQuest, Yahoo Maps & Google Maps suggests. I prefer to stay on the Garden State Parkway, the whole way. In fact, if you hire a service to take you to the airport, they prefer to take you that way.

But I was never able to easily show people how to go that way, until now.

So instead of taking the GSP to I-80E to I-95 etc like this shows, you can now pretty much just stay on the GSP, like my version shows. How does this work?

As the Google Lat Long Blog describes, you simply drag the lines to the roads you would like to take. I took a screen cast of my doing this for the route I mentioned above, here it is:

You can then overlay satellite imagery, traffic, hybrid, etc over your map, if you prefer and finally, give someone the link to your preferred route.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld thread confirms what many people have suspected for a long time. The top advertisement inside a Google AdSense unit is the highest paying ad in that unit.

AdSenseAdvisor has confirmed this:

I can confirm that in the general ad auction, our system will target the highest-paying ads to the ad unit implemented first in your HTML, working down through the auction results to fill in the rest of your ad units in order.

Most people knew this, but it is nice to have official confirmation from a Google representative.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The Yahoo Search Marketing Blog announced new features they added to the Panama (Yahoo Search Marketing) advertisers console.

The largest feature is a method of moving or copying keywords from one ad group to another ad group.

On the Ad Group page under your Campaigns tab, you’ll now see “Move” and “Copy” buttons. As the names imply, these let you move your keywords from one ad group to another and copy them as appropriate. Note that you’re still limited to 100 keywords per ad group.

Select a keyword you want to move by clicking the check box next to it. The first time you hit the “Move” button you’ll get a pop up that shows some useful instructional text. You may opt not to view this in future. You’ll then be taken through an easy step-by-step process for moving your keyword.

Now new advertisers can use the keyword selection tool during the online enrollment process. In addition, they made the keyword section tool easier to use and more useful. Plus, Yahoo now helps you write your ads by giving you ad text ideas.

Those are the new features, the forums don't have much feedback on them, as of yet.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums, WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

The Inside AdSense Blog announced that Google has launched referrals 2.0, or Pay Per Action, to all AdSense publishers who have the referrals option.

Many people only had referral products for Google products, such as AdSense, AdWords, Google Toolbar, Firefox, Google Pack and so on. Now, you have access to thousands of referral products from any AdWords advertiser who set a campaign up.

This should help improve the lack of impressions with Google PPA that we have noticed since they launched the beta.

I have tons of coverage of how it all works in my past articles. I have been beta testing both ends of the product since they launched, so you can probably learn a lot about it by reviewing the Google Pay Per Action archive (tag).

Remember, referral products, including pay per action, can be advertised and promoted more heavily than standard AdSense ads. So you can ask people to click on your ads. And they also include Google's text link ads, such as this one .

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

It appears that Network Solutions, the domain name registrar, is now in the search engine optimization. They have a page guaranteeing top search engine results or your money back.

Here are the various plans:

• You can pay $1800 and get no guarantee to rank 10 keywords well
• You can pay $2800 to submit 20 keywords of which 5 are guaranteed to be top ten
• You can pay $3800 to submit 30 keywords of which 10 are guaranteed to be top ten
• You can pay $5800 to submit 50 keywords of which 20 are guaranteed to be top ten

There is fine print, of course....

• No flash sites
• No adult keywords
• No hosting service downtime allowed
• No changes can be made to the site
• Top ten rankings in any of the 12 search engines within 10 months from completion date
• And more

If you look at the process they laid out for their top 10 search results plan, you can see a bit more. For example, they recommend their "Link Building Service package and/or an optimized Press Release" with their "Top 10 Search Results package." So right there, we see that link building is not included in the main package. They conduct keyword research and a site analysis, they write the content for you, they submit to search engines (I don't know why), they make links from your current home page to your new "optimized pages," they do reporting and then watch.

I am honestly considering giving it a try, just to see the quality of work. Should be fun. Any ideas for a site topic?

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

When you maintain a blog or a regularly updated website, is there an optimal amount of time you should wait before updating your articles, or should you post them all at once? In a WebmasterWorld thread, a website publisher is wondering if publishing 5 articles at a time once a week is better than publishing one a day.

Ogletree says that either way is fine because there is apparently no evidence to boost one claim over the other.

There is no evidence that adding a lot of content at one time can hurt a site if the content is of high quality.

I'm inclined to agree with ccDan, who says that you should spread them out over time, especially from a reader's perspective.

I think it's better to spread them out than to post a bunch at once. Just for the sake of getting visitors to return to your site.

There's also been good advice dispensed that if you are concerned about search engine rankings, you can check your log files:

I have never had any problems adding lots of content. If you are really concerned about this you can watch your log files and see when gbot gets all the new articles and then post more.

[Hat tip to Ogletree.]

Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A number of people are reporting that Google has implemented an AdWords Campaign Optimizer tool. We were first alerted to this on the Search Engine Roundtable Forums, where PPCblogger kindly provided us with some detailed screenshots of the tool in action.

For now, this appears to be available to select UK advertisers, as I was unable to find it in my AdWords campaigns nor was I able to find any Google US help pages on the feature. The Google AdWords Help Center (UK only) says that the goal of the tool is to fine tune your advertising campaign.

The Campaign Optimizer is a free AdWords tool designed to help you fine-tune your advertising campaigns. When you run the Campaign Optimizer, we automatically analyze your budget, keywords, and landing page, and create a customized proposal for your campaign. You can then review the proposed changes and accept the ones you want to apply.

You can reach the Campaign Optimizer via the Optimize Campaign link on your campaign details page. You can also go to the Tools page of the Campaign Management tab and click Campaign Optimizer.

Included within the campaign optimizer are keyword recommendations, advertisement recommendations, and data related to when users last ran the tool.

I'm not sure if this is being rolled out to all of the UK advertisers at once at the moment, but initial reports of the availability of the tool are coming from there.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update: Jeremy Mayes reports that this is available to US advertisers and points us to Google Help pages explaining what the optimizer does and how often it can be used.

As an example, here's a movie trailer for Behind the Mask:

All viewers have the ability to share the URL and embed the movie into their websites. They can also watch the videos in fullscreen mode.

MySpace subscribers, on the other hand, are allowed to vote (Booyah or No Way), participate in the discussion, save the movie to their favorites, utilize the "Email This" feature, bulletin/blog it, or add the videos to their MySpace profile. To access similar videos, users can subscribe to the video channel and be alerted when new videos are posted.

The services are largely similar, with some notable differences.

Both have the same pop dialog box that informs you that you have to log in to perform an operation:

This is how it looks on YouTube:

And MySpace's popup isn't much different:

Once you opt in for a subscription, it is verified. The notable difference here is that YouTube does not show how many users are subscribed to a certain channel, whereas MySpace does:

YouTube:

MySpace:

You can view your subscriptions and browse through them in a similar fashion on both services:

YouTube:

MySpace:

Rating is a little different as well. YouTube's rating system is out of 5 stars. MySpace's rating system is most like Digg -- you can either thumbs up the video or thumbs it down.

YouTube:

MySpace:

The other notable difference is the display of comments. YouTube does not feature user avatars in the comments system, whereas MySpace does. MySpace is already seeing spam posts, but I don't see a way to report them as Spam. YouTube has a Spam link on the page.

YouTube:

MySpace:

Forum members are largely excited and think this is a promising move:

...its nice to see a site become the full package.

Myspace could capture a lot of eyes from youtube if they cater to the music video providers. The video encoding quality is much better on myspace than youtube and the audio is in stereo.

Indeed, the quality of MySpace videos is better than YouTube's. I think that if they continue to focus on professional content, there is a lot of promise for MySpace.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has a member saying he has been beta testing the Microsoft alternative to Google's AdSense program, named ContentAds.

He gave the new contextual ad program, from a publisher's perspective, a great review.

To be honest is was actually pretty sweet. I am not going to talk about any specifics until is goes open beta but I feel it is a huge improvement in certain aspects. I am just waiting until I can take it for a spin on some of my websites to really get a feel for it. I wish MS would just give me a job so I can help them step it up some more. For any platform for content publishers you really need to focus on the filtering and reports. Those are the two area I use the most so the most attention should be paid attention to them. A close third of course is the ad creation process. Watch out for MS, they are not going down without a fight.

But as far as I know, ContentAds is only open to very large and trusted publishers and there is no program for smaller publishers. Back in February 2006, I reported that MSN to Release Contextual Ad Program, ContentAds in 2006. That did happen in October 2006 with Microsoft Begins Testing Content Ads Beta, but it was only open to large publishers and to a limited set of adCenter advertisers to opt in. Microsoft continually expanded the ContentAds availability for advertisers but never really expanded the publisher side of things.

In fact, there was a lot of controversy over adCenter advertisers being forced into the contextual program without requesting their ads to show up on the content network. Next time adCenter was upfront about this change, and last week they announced it again.

So is this just a rumor? I am not sure. I sent out emails to my Microsoft contacts in this area, so we will see. I will update you if I find out more information.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Microsoft sent me a response that they are currently still only running ContentAds on their own network. They do not have a release date for a public release of ContentAds just yet.

Last month, Yahoo added PayPal as a payment option for the Yahoo Publisher Network publishers.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports publishers now received the money they earned with Yahoo in their PayPal accounts. The payments were first noticed yesterday, so if you are a publisher and selected the PayPal option, check to see if you received your money.

One member was surprised to see that PayPal did not take a percentage of the payment, like they normally do.

Awesome, just got my payment from paypal! Better yet, paypal didn't take anything out of it! It was the full amount! Very cool! I like the paypal payment now! Very very cool!

The YPN payment page clearly says, "you will not be charged a transaction fee for money deposited to your PayPal account from the Yahoo! Publisher Network program."

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google announced the Google Gadgets Venture, a program where developers can earn $5,000 or $100,000 grants for developing Google Gadgets.

The $5,000 payout are for developers whose gadgets receive at least 250,000 weekly page views and apply for the program. To apply, you need to submit a one-page proposal detailing how you’d use the grant to improve your gadget, and email it to gadgetventures@google.com.

The $100,000 seed investment is the step above, where developers would like to build a business around the Google gadgets platform. The first requirement is that you be part of the $5,000 grant project, after that - you need to convince Google you are worth the $100,000 investment.

There is a huge Google Ventures FAQ with more details.

Danny Sullivan has a quote, "The payoff for us is in more pageviews and users. By getting more users, we get more searches," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience.

We have a simple Google Gadget with currently only 1,226 users and 32,437 pageviews, so we need some help to reach the $5,000 grant. Go to this page and click on the "Add it Now" button to help our cause, of course, please tell your friends.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.

The world is still spinning, and people are still digging. There have been happy reports on Digg and sad reports on Digg. Little known facts are now more widespread, and rumors are circulating. Such is life.

A few weeks ago, the new version of Google Analytics left beta . With this came some new features, especially the highly desired hourly reporting. I'm glad about that.

SEO.com is rumored to have sold for $5 million which is a pretty substantial amount of money. Personally, while the three-letter domain is helpful, I know where the best SEO sites are already, so I don't know if it will do much for me. The cost, however, is not surprising, though it really is a rumor at this point as indicated by the update by Mike Mann himself in the comments of that blog announcement.

With Google Docs and Spreadsheets getting better and better each day, you should be aware that there are some lesser known features within Google Docs and spreadsheet. Here are 5 things you may not know: there's live lookup via Google Finance, you can perform Google searches within a spreadsheet, there are color-coded live comments, Google Docs supports revisioning, and documents are backed up in multiple places at once to avoid possible loss of data.

Dave Naylor reported that YouTube is giving FTP information away . This was discovered after we realized that Google Video is exposing usernames and passwords and is doing so on an unsecure (HTTP) protocol. Pretty scary stuff for those concerned about privacy.

Business owners, rejoice! You can now verify your business on Google Maps . Life for you has just gotten much easier.

Just a few days ago, we heard that Google has purchased GrandCentral , a phone service that allows people with multiple phone lines to combine them into one line.

Earlier this week, Aaron Wall announced that Threadwatch is closing . There's been an overwhelming response to the closure, and many people hope Aaron will reconsider. He hasn't responded to them yet. Best of luck, Aaron.

In May, we reported that Bill Gates is interested in focusing and bettering their search engine. A WebmasterWorld thread highlights an article in BusinessWeek that emphasizes Microsoft's resolve to focus its energy on acquiring companies that specialize in vertical search.

The article mentions Microsoft's recent acquisitions:

• February 2007: MotionBridge - search for mobile phones
• February 2007: Medostry - health care information database
• March 2007: TellMe Networks - voice recognition for mobile search

The acquisitions—along with Microsoft's efforts to build its own niche search engines to find images, classified ads, and other content—are aimed at finding a chink in Google's seemingly impenetrable armor. "There's a lot of opportunity in domain-specific areas," said Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie at a February investment conference highlighting the Medstory purchase. "That search technology is first being woven into MSN Health & Fitness, and ultimately it will be woven into the mainline search."

It is true that Google is the web search giant, but there's potential to break that into verticals, just as there is potential to create social sites that appeal to a different type of audience.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld member is reporting that she has purchased a domain from a third-party domain provider and has built a website upon the domain that seems to be pretty Kosher. Her site, however, is not being indexed.

What she does know is that the Internet Wayback Machine indicates that the domain was spammy prior to her ownership of the domain. She, therefore, needs to submit a reinclusion request.

How do you do a reinclusion request? Go to Google Webmaster Central and click on Webmaster Tools. You will then see a list of sites you maintain and there is an option to "Submit a reconsideration request." This will only work if your site is verified.

On the next screen, you are instructed to only utilize the reconsideration request if your site had previously violated the guidelines (but was subsequently cleaned up) or if you recently acquired a domain which may have previously violated these guidelines. This appears to be the case for the WebmasterWorld member.

You can then select your verified site from the drop down and fill out information regarding why Google should reconsider it and you should be seeing a change within the next few weeks.

Google specifically has an option for submitting "reconsideration requests" for sites that you "recently acquired which you suspect may have previously violated" Google's webmaster guidelines.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We covered Google's Click to Call feature which adds an image of a phone next to an AdWords ad and gets users in touch with advertisers on Google's dime. In a Google Groups thread, a new advertiser is eager to sign up.

Unfortunately, however, she is unable to.

AdWordsPro writes in to say that Google is not accepting any new advertisers for the time being.

I am sorry to say that the click-to-call program is not accepting new advertisers at this point - and I am not yet aware of when this might change.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

A Google Groups thread announces a new interface for Google Docs which happens to be miles better than the older interface. The Google Docs and Spreadsheets blog also covers the launch and redesign.

What has changed?

• There's a great new appearance.
• There are now folders for easy organization.
• The search function has improved.
• The interface now lets you view documents based on chronology, so you can see documents edited "today," "yesterday," "earlier this month," or "earlier this year."
• You can also sort by collaborator in shared documents.

Here's a screenshot of the new look of Google Docs:

This interface is much improved over the old one. Great job, guys.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

In mid April, Google released a new way to remove content from Google. Since then, people have been using it but there has been a lot of confusion on how it works and doesn't work.

A Google Group thread has dozens of posts with questions on why pages they remove, still appear. Or why it may take so long to remove a page.

Due to that, Susan Moskwa, of Google Webmaster Central, promised clearer instructions on the Google URL removal tool and also provided more details on what you should do to remove content from Google's index.

I'm sorry that you've been frustrated by the URL removal process! Just to clarify, here's what's required in order to get a URL successfully removed:

If you want to remove an individual file (a web page, an image, etc.), you can do any one of the following:
-Make sure that the URL returns an HTTP 404 or 410 status code
-Block the URL using a meta noindex tag
-Block the URL using a robots.txt file

However, if you want to remove an entire directory (or an entire website), you have to block that content using a robots.txt file. Just returning a 404 isn't enough; this is because it's possible for a directory to return a 404 status code, but still serve out files underneath it. Robotting out the entire directory ensures that all of its children are disallowed as well.

Forum discussion at Google Group.

Was Google AdSense a bit too square for you? Well, now you can opt for rounded corners.

The Google AdSense Blog announced two types of rounded corners. The first is "slightly rounded corners" and the second is "very rounded corners."

Here is a screen capture of the new feature in the AdSense publisher console that enables publishers to select the roundness of their ads.

And here is a "very rounded corners" ad, that is live:

So far the feedback in the forums are very positive towards this new addition and element of control. There is only one post with feedback on the impact on earnings, but I won't quote that until we get some more feedback from a larger set of publishers.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has discussion about a service one member was offered.

In short, the service is composed of two offerings:

(1) Damage your competitor's search engine rankings
(2) Protect your own search engine rankings

They use threats in their email marketing message, such as "Pay up or have your forum spammed!" and "Your forum will be spammed in the next few days" and then "Pay up to this url or have your forum heavily spam."

What should you do if you get such an email? Forward it to Google or let me know.

But seriously, all you need to do is "just hit the delete button," as forum administrator, Robert Kerry said.

The big question is, can a competitor hurt your rankings? We discussed this most recently in August 2006 and October 2006. I mentioned that Google has a FAQ that addresses just that.

What can I do if I'm afraid my competitor is harming my ranking in Google?
There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you're concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don't control the content of these pages.

"Almost nothing" are the words used here, so technically, it is possible.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

In late 2004 and early 2005, page hijacks were a huge concern with Google. Back then, sites used a 302 redirect to take over a susceptible page within the search results.

Marcia reports at Search Engine Watch Forums that the hijacks are still an issue.

I found this just this week when doing an inurl: search for one of my domains, and it's the OTHER site that shows up instead of my homepage. A search for that site by name has always brought the site up - but no more, it's nowhere to be found.

One domain causing it to happen has over 50K hijacked pages duplicated and in the index on their domain, and another has many, many thousands and is running Adsense. They're both anonymous proxies.

DaveN concurs that he has been seeing these proxy sites; "I have seen anonproxy sites rotating IP address, and cloaking the real one that google gets..."

There are not many examples showing this in the thread so it is hard to pinpoint for you guys. But there are respected SEOs discussing the issue.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: WebmasterWorld also has a thread on this topic. The post shares a lot more information, so I will quote most of it.

Over the weekend my index page and now some internal pages were proxy hijacked within Google's results. My well ranked index page dropped from the results and has no title, description or cache. A search for "My Company Name" brings up (now two) listings of the malicious proxy at the top of the results.

The URL of the proxy is formatted as such:
https://www.scumbagproxy.com/cgi-bin/nph-ssl.cgi/000100A/http/www.mysite.com

A quick search in Google for "cgi-bin/nph-ssl.cgi/000100A/" brings up now 55,000+ results when Saturday it was 13,000 and Sunday it was 30,000. The number of sites affected are increasing exponentially and your site could be next.

Take preventative action now by doing the following...

1. Add this to all of your headers:
<base href="http://www.yoursite.com/" />

and if you see an attempted hijack...

2. Block the site via .htaccess:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} yourproblemproxy\.com

3. Block the IP address of the proxy
order allow,deny
deny from 11.22.33.44
allow from all

4. Do your research and file a spam report with Google.
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

In what may be a response to Terry Semel's departure from Yahoo, WebmasterWorld moderator martinibuster reports that Wenda Harris Millard, Yahoo's Chief Sales Officer, has left the company. Search Engine Land reports that Millard will be working at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

This is also part of a Yahoo initiative to combine search and display advertising teams under the leadership of David Karnstedt, according to a June 24 press release. Yahoo has written in the press release that Millard is leaving "effective immediately."

However, Millard has told the Wall Street Journal that it appears that they misrepresented her departure.

"I feel badly that Yahoo has had such a tough time lately," said Ms. Millard in an interview. "And I'm sorry they announced the story this way because clearly I resigned and I have a great new job," she added.

According to forum members, Millard is "going to be missed big-time."

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Kara Swisher has interviewed Wenda Harris Millard regarding the recent change in management. [Thanks, Christine Mohan!]

Last week, I wrote about how to see geotargeted Google ads from another location. The solution, for Google, is relatively simple: add location attributes and values to the Google ad preview page. However, this time, a DigitalPoint Forums member asks how you can see geotargeted Yahoo ads from another location.

The solution to this is tougher, since there is no Yahoo ad preview option. The only way I am aware of is to use a USA proxy server to view the ads. I'd love to hear it if other people have additional suggestions.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

According to a Google Groups post, Maps Guide Brian has informed us that users can now write reviews for businesses in eleven countries. The catch: you need a Google account to do so.

To write a review for a business, just search for it, expand the information window by clicking on the "+" sign, and click on "Write a review" at the top. You can also expand the window by clicking on "more info" in the left panel. Once you submit your review, it'll appear on Google Maps right away.

Barry experimented with this feature and tried it out on our company, as you can see in his Search Engine Land post on June 19th. He walked us through the process of creating a review, and I just checked -- it's still there on June 26:

Cool stuff. I guess the reputation management police might be after the real negative reviews, but positive reviews won't get hit so hard.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Yesterday, users reported that Google Reader was not refreshing feeds and TechCrunch picked up the story. A Google Groups thread has also been monitoring the downtime, eventually with Mihai Parparita, a Google Reader Engineer, informing the community that the problem has been resolved.

Very sorry about this, feeds should be correctly refreshing again. They will catch up on updates over the next few hours.

Google Reader also suffered from an outage on June 12th.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

The SEO community is suffering a big loss. Aaron Wall has announced on Threadwatch that he is closing down the site on Friday for a number of reasons: bad publicity, edgy news, gossip, decentralization, spam, and having other priorities in life.

Aaron is happily in a relationship now, so I really cannot blame him. However, the news has come as a shock to the Threadwatch community, many of whom are asking Aaron to change his mind.

Threadwatch was nearly three years old, having been founded on October 5, 2004 by Nick Wilson who then sold it to Aaron Wall in November of 2005. Over the course of time, Threadwatch has been a centralized part of many SEOs/SEMs to find the latest news and discuss some of the more controversial topics of the industry. It was a hub with some very good information, and I personally am sad to see it go.

I wish Aaron and the other Threadwatch moderators the best.

Threadwatch forum discussion continues at Threadwatch -- until Friday, I suppose.

I have been tracking a Google AdWords bug via a WebmasterWorld thread for several days now. The bug is that AdWords professionals who have linked client accounts within the My Client Center (MCC) are unlinking - so AdWords managers cannot access those accounts easily.

The bug was first reported on June 16th. AdWordsAdvisor confirmed the bug on June 18th. Yesterday, June 25th, the bug seemed to have gotten worse, by spreading to many more AdWords advertisers and professionals.

In addition to the unlinking of client accounts, some AdWords professionals are noticing this message:

Your qualification is at risk.
You are at risk of losing your qualification due to low account spending. To retain your qualification, you must maintain the minimum account spending level.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

If you are logged into any Google property (Gmail, AdWords, AdSense, Docs, etc.) while doing a Google search, your results may be personalized, without you really knowing it.

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses just that. It is funny, because often you visit your own sites more than your competitor's site. So when you do "ego" searches, the personalized results may rank your site higher, because Google knows you visit your site more often. This leads to confusion for those who want to see how well they rank in Google.

How can you see Google search results without the personalization? Two options.

(1) Log out of Google
(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search in the URL bar

The example I gave in the WebmasterWorld thread is http://www.google.com/search?q=keyword%20phrase&pws=0

By appending that, the results won't be personalized. Yea, it may be a pain in the neck to do this. Joost de Valk released a OpenSearch plugin you can add to Internet Explorer or Firefox to make it easier. I did something similar for Safari users. It basically adds a search option to your browser search bar, which you can easily select. Here is how it looks like in Safari, but works similarly in Firefox or Internet Explorer.

I just select the Google-P and presto, I got Google results without a personalized taste. I explain more on how to set it up for Safari at my personal blog, but if you use Firefox or Internet Explorer, you will want to see Joost de Valk.

I personally keep personalized results on, but I often need to check with personalized results off. So this toolbar comes in handy. Personalization is all over the place now. In fact, I just got my July edition of Wired and noticed I was on the front cover. Personalization at its best!

I would just like to add one more thing, a bit unrelated to this post. I placed an example of how adding &pws=0 to the URL would change the results from personalized to non-personalized results. But my example, which was a search on [keyword phrase] turned out to rank my corporate site in the first position. It was totally unintentional and I had no idea I was in the first result for a search on [keyword phrase] until after I put the example in the WebmasterWorld thread. Funny, unintentional forum spam.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Cre8asite Forums is holding a small poll of their members, asking if it is harder to optimize for Google's Universal Search as opposed to OneBox results?

Right now, the majority of people feel it is not harder because it "follows similar rules as OneBox Optimization."

Well, does it? While OneBox results were almost guaranteed to be at the number one spot on the page, a Google Universal vertical result may not show up at the top or at all.

While Universal Search may take results as if would the OneBox extractor, but the logic in how and when these vertical results are placed within the Google web search results differ from before.

But SEOs and SEMs are up for the challenge and they are excited.

Ben Pfeiffer wrote an excellent article on How To Capitalize on Google Universal Search, which should be read, if you missed it.

I am glad to see most SEOs in Cre8asite Forums smiling over the change as opposed to being upset with it. They are seeing this change as an opportunity and are thus more likely to benefit and be ahead of the curve.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks what are the search engine optimization implications of switching from ASP to PHP?

This is a fairly basic SEO question but it is a good one. This question applies to changing any URLs, not just from ASP to PHP. It is also from HTML to CFM or CFM to ASP and so on. It also includes changing a file name from abc.html to cba.html.

Search engines index pages. Pages are determined by their file name and extension and domain name. If you change any of them, it is considered a new page. So if you have a page at domain.com/filename.html and change it to domain.com/filename.php - it is a new page in the eyes of a search engine. If you have domain.com/filename.html and change it to domain.com/newfilename.html - it is a new page in the eyes of a search engine. If you have a page at domain.com/filename.html and you change it to domain.net/filename.html 0 it is a new page in the eyes of a search engine. By now, I assume you get my point.

What can you do? I would follow the same steps I laid out in Version 2: Relaunching a Site: SEO Considerations. You must set up 301 redirects from the old pages to the new pages, with dynamic sites, it may be easier, since there may be some database logic that you can set these 301 redirects up dynamically. You must set up custom 404 page not found error pages up for those pages you simply can't 301 or for the pages that you forget to 301.

Those are some of the basics when it comes to switching page extensions or pages in general.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Last week, I reported that Microsoft adCenter was adding negative keywords on the campaign level. This maintenance would have occurred on Saturday, June 23.

However, in WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums, and DigitalPoint Forums adCenter411 updates the threads to inform the community that the scheduled maintenance has been rescheduled for a later undetermined date. The adCenter blog has also been updated.

The Microsoft adCenter June 23 upgrade has been rescheduled for a later date. Your campaigns and keywords are running, sign in to the adCenter UI to manage your account. A future upgrade will allow you to manage negative keywords at the campaign level in addition to several features to improve performance. We’ll keep you informed as to when this future upgrade will occur. We apologize for any confusion that this may have caused and thank you for your patience and understanding.

Reporting is currently delayed, view the timestamp on the adCenter Reporting tab to see when your data was last updated.

Since many advertisers were looking forward to this update, I hope that "later date" occurs soon.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums, and DigitalPoint Forums.

We've been watching the Google "minus thirty" penalty for quite some time. Recent reports at WebmasterWorld have webmasters relying upon each other for support and advice, and after several months, some people have lately been successful.

Some people admitted to having duplicate content. Others feel that it's due to participation in link schemes and having sites linked to bad neighborhoods. Even others feel that their pages may have been over-optimized. In some cases, paid links were removed. It also helped numerous webmasters to clean up the code.

After reevaluating the site, ensuring there are proper 301 redirects, and editing the robots.txt so that it would not be spidering any duplicate pages, many have had a lot of success after submitting a reinclusion request.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

On Search Engine Land, Barry wrote about a Read/Write Web blog post that highlights a recent presentation by Google's VP of Engineering, Udi Manber. In the presentation, Manber says that of the 20-25% queries that Google sees today, we have never seen before.

What explains the "astonishingly high percentage" of new queries, as one member puts it?

Some speculate that it's a long tail search:

A high percentage of these new queries are probably the obscure terms or the long tails created by various keyword combinations, new domains and names, etc.

Agreed:

On the other hand, when I just do a simple web search, I often get results so bad that I need to make it so obscure, so long, so detailed that it don't direct me to the first spammy forum. I mostly make technical related searches...

So yes, I can imagine that at LEAST 20-25% of every search is brand new.

Others are simply shocked at that high percentage.

I'm trying to wrap my head around what a number like that means when it comes to writing content.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Almost two weeks ago eBay pulled their Google AdWords ads, and we estimated that Google was out about $26 million per month from this "experiment."

Now, eBay has resume their advertising with Google, but as the NY Times reports, they did so with less frequency.

EBay, the online auction company, said Friday that it planned to resume placing Web advertising through Google, but that it would rely on alternative advertising services to a greater degree.

Hani Durzy, a spokesman for eBay, said Friday that his company would resume advertising on Google, but at reduced levels. “I will tell you it will be in a much more limited way than it was before,” Mr. Durzy said. “What we found is that we were not as dependent on AdWords as some people thought.”

A WebmasterWorld thread has Google AdWords advertisers wishing that they hold true to that statement and limit their ads.

They could just eliminate all the useless search terms they appear for and save a bundle. It wouldn't affect their results.

But many are now seeing some of those "useless search terms" appear in the sponsored results section in Google from eBay. Terms such as "used kleenex" and many others.

Time will tell.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Here is another unscientific Google AdSense study on how much one can earn with Google AdSense. Keep in mind that DigitalPoint Forums has one of the largest base of proactive AdSense publishers on the Internet.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread asks how much are people earning on a single day with AdSense? With currently 80 responses, here is the break down.

42.50% (34) said they earn $5 or less per day, 12.50% said they earn between $5 and $10 per day, 20% said they earn between $10 and $25 per day, 6.25% said they earn between $25 and $50 per day, 5% said they earn between $50 and $75 per day, 1.25% said they earn $75 and $100 per day and 12.5% said they earn more than a $100 per day.

Another way to look at it is that 75% earn less than $25 per day or 25% earn more than $25 per day. Only 18.75% earn more than $50 per day and only 13.75% said they earn more than $75 per day.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Cre8asite Forums thread asks the question, does search engines rank (or index) an individual forum post or a complete forum thread in the search results?

The simple answer is that search engines simply index pages. So a thread is made up of several posts on a single or several pages. For example, the Cre8asite Forums thread, can list 20 posts per page and then you have to click to the next page to view the 21st post from that thread. Each page, would rank differently, unless the search engine considers them similar enough.

There are some forums that enable a user to view a single post on a page. So if those pages are accessible to search engines, it is possible for a single post to rank and be indexed. However, most forum owners would likely prefer the whole thread be indexed and exclude the individual post, due to duplicate content issues.

Bill Slawski explains in his post in the thread that there is a patent application on Agent Rank where the search engine will break up components of the page and rank each component on its own merit.

Imagine a system that instead of ranking content on a page level, breaks those pages down and looks at smaller content items on those pages, which it associates with digital signatures. Content creators could be given reputation scores, which could influence the rankings of pages where their content appears, or which they own, edit, or endorse.

Now, this is probably not used much today - if at all. But Bill says, "they may, or may not be a good match for a forum - but it's possible that both could be - forum posts are usually written by different authors, and are separated from other posts."

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Well, it's summer up here -- the longest day of the year was yesterday, and thus, this was the longest week of the year (or it felt like it!) However, this week, we had some good coverage of SES Latino and there have been some interesting stories in search.

SES Latino: A Big Hit

As you know, we had Dave Rohrer, Carolyn Shelby, and Li Evans cover some great sessions at SES Latino, which was held earlier this week in Miami. Again, if you missed the coverage, feel free to check it out:

• Introduction to Search Engine Marketing
• Tapping into US Hispanic and Latin America via Search
• SES Latino 2007 Keynote with Gonzalo Alonso of Google
• Search Landscapes: US Hispanics and Latin Americans
• SEM Campaign and Project Management
• Search Term Research & Targeting
• The Challenges Of Search Marketing To US Hispanics & Latin Americans
• Converting Visitors to Buyers; Persuasion Architecture
• Targeting Spanish/Portuguese Search Ads by Demographics & Behavior
• Search Marketing with Latinos: Roundtable
• Web Analytics and Measuring Success Overview

Thanks again to cshel, Dave, and Li, for your excellent recaps!

We're already preparing for SES San Jose which is to be held on August 20-23. I hope to see you there. And Matt McGee, just relax and chill with us in the front row. However, you have to let me do the blogging. Thanks :)

Google Buffy Update

Earlier this month, Google pushed out a new update. Then, Vanessa Fox announced that she was leaving Google. Since she loves Buffy, Google pushed out its June update in honor of her favorite character. In actuality, it's the Vanessa update.

On a similar note, there are reports that an MSN Live update is occurring now. People are noticing "wild mood swings" in rankings.

Father's Day 2007

On Sunday, we celebrated Father's Day. As you know, we like to dress up the forums for the special occasion. We've posted a list of search engine Father's Day themes (and ours, too, of course). Expect more wild and crazy designs for some very strange upcoming holidays. :)

Goodbye, Terry Semel

Earlier this week, news broke that Terry Semel has left his position as CEO of Yahoo. His successor is Jerry Yang, one of the company's co-founders. The big question is how this will affect us and if we'll see any new changes. There's been some wild speculation, but what are your thoughts?

eBay vs. Google: How Much Did they Lose?

At the eBay event in Boston last week, Google and eBay ran into some competition with each other. Google crashed a party, and eBay crashed Google ads. How much do you think was lost? A lot. eBay was rumored to be paying Google $26 million monthly, or $312 million annually. I think the fun is over now. You both need each other. Let's be friends and make amends.

Google Phone?!

The much anticipated Google phone is here... or is it? That's what we want to know. The image itself is not that appealing, in my humble opinion. So far, our poll results echo the doubts on DigitalPoint. Most people think that it's not real.

Microsoft adCenter

It's been a big week of news for Microsoft adCenter. This week, the adCenter team clarified its position on trademark bidding. Tomorrow, June 23, Microsoft adCenter will be performing an update to its system that will add more people to the content network and also support negative keywords at the campaign level.

Mahawhat?

This week, an unidentified SEO bid on a bunch of keywords for Mahalo, the search engine launched by Jason Calacanis. Jason spoke with Michael Gray about his product and Michael offered his most candid opinion. Check it out if you're interested.

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses a not-so-talked-about feature about how to locate whether your images have been used (or stolen) on your domain. Ogletree writes:

I just found out you can do a site:domain.com search in Google images and get a list of images on a site. It will also show images that other sites are stealing.

This is actually covered in the Google Image Search help page:

Can I do complex searches with image search using Boolean operators and other Google commands?

You can use all operators for image search that you would use in a Google text search. For example, you can use "site:" with image search to restrict your search to images on a particular website. So, to find all the pictures of lemurs at the Duke Primate Center, the query would be " site:duke.edu lemurs". You can also refine your search using the Advanced Image Search page.

Here's an example of the site operator in action. Note how you will find results from sites who also link to your images.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

As I reported yesterday, Microsoft adCenter is adding negative keywords to a campaign level. But a few questions remain. Barry reported on Search Engine Land that adCenter is upgrading more subscribers to the content network on June 28.

Advertisers who are selected will be automatically included and be billed for clicks on ads within Microsoft's contextual program.

According to Barry, you have to opt out yourself if you don't want to be involved in the content network. You can do so by filling out this form.

Discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yesterday, I reported that the Google phone is here. Today, not everybody is sure it's the real deal. A DigitalPoint Forums thread has a poll asking whether the phone is the real thing, and more people (5 vs. 4) believe that it's a fake.

GuyFromChicago says:

I'm not sure if it's real or not...if it is real I'm not all that impressed.

I think I agree. The Google phone announcement comes on the heels of the June 29 iPhone launch, and I feel that they need a comparable product to be a best-seller.

Apparently, the rumor is circulating. Search Engine Journal and Digital Inspiration believes that this is the real thing.

What do you think? Vote in our poll.

Forum discussion and poll continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

You can now verify your business via telephone or SMS, in addition to the old postcard option that can take 3 weeks to complete.

The first option is to verify by phone now. Here is what that looks like:

I suspect, if you choose the phone option and click continue, that Google will automatically call you and take you through a step by step process to validate that your are the business owner.

The second option is the classic snail mail option, where Google sends you a pin on a postcard via USPS mail. It looks like this:

The third and final option is an SMS option, but for this business, it was not available. It looks like this:

There are more details on this at this help page, which explains:

The phone verification system allows businesses to easily and quickly verify their identity. Businesses receive an automated phone call during which they can input the unique PIN that Google displays on their screen. Once completed successfully, businesses have confirmed their listing changes which will be incorporated into Google Maps.

After businesses add or edit their listings, they can choose to receive a phone call to their business phone number. A unique PIN is displayed for each business at this time. Businesses can decide between receiving the call immediately or after a five minute delay. Additionally, businesses who prefer to receive the call at a later time can return to the Local Business Center whenever they wish. An automated call placed to the business prompts the business owner for the PIN from their screen. Upon inputting their PIN, businesses confirm that they have made these changes to their Google Maps business listing.

Currently the phone verification feature is only available for U.S. and Canadian businesses. Businesses without a touch-tone phone, however, must verify via postcard.

The SMS option is not available in the US, China, and Japan. The phone option is not available in China or Japan.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

There appears to be some early reports of a Live.com or MSN Search update taking place now.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a few signs and signals from the SEO community that such an update is currently underway.

It is currently not clear if it is a global change or if this update is just affecting certain industries.

We have been seeing some wild swings in MSN search lately, anyone seeing an update in rankings?

Of course, some are seeing poor quality signs.

I thought they had resolved the blogspot problem, but today I see several junk pages ranking well, including the #1 spot for the phrase I am monitoring.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I typically like to wait for Danny Sullivan to do his large chart, plotting all the various metrics companies against each other.

But Nielsen//NetRatings released (PDF) a report with new share figures. Here they are:

In the number one slot, as normal, is Google Search with a growth in search queries year-over-year of 44.9% and a search market share of 56.3% ending in June 2007. Yahoo! Search follows with a growth in search queries year-over-year of 18.6% and a search market share of 21.5% ending in June 2007. MSN/Windows Live Search follows with a growth in search queries year-over-year of only 0.8% and a search market share of 8.4% ending in June 2007. AOL Search came in fourth with a growth in search queries year-over-year of 5.1% and a search market share of 5.3% ending in June 2007. In fifth is Ask.com with a decline in search queries year-over-year of -2.8% and a search market share of 2.0% ending in June 2007.

Again, this is just one data company, I always look forward to Danny plotting them all over several months and years - so you get true perspective.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A search in Google on mahalo recently but not currently brought up Google AdWords ads that pretty much mocked the new Mahalo search engine, by Jason Calacanis.

The ads read:

Mahalo
It’s seriously just About.com.
Only worse.
www.tropicalseo.com

Mahalo
That’s Hawaiian for 8 visitors a
month.
www.scoreboard-media.com

Mahalo
12 reasons this is the worst idea
ever and won’t make money.
www.stuntdubl.com

Mahalo
When relevancy is this poor
why show any results at all?
www.threadwatch.org

Now, I believe that these sites that were advertised were not listing these ads on Google themselves. In fact, they all wrote negative posts on Mahalo and someone thought it would be funny to bid on the term Mahalo and place ads pointing to those articles.

The question is who did that?

In any event, Jason Calacanis interviewed four SEOs that specifically did not like Mahalo and posted the podcast at CalacanisCast beta 29. It makes for a very interesting listening to (no need to watch it, unless you want to see Jason's reaction to some of the answers given to him.

Forum discussion on fun ads at DigitalPoint Forums.

According to reports posted in the Search Engine Roundtable Forums, Microsoft adCenter is expanding keyword management to the campaign level this Saturday.

On Saturday, June 23, Microsoft adCenter will upgrade, expanding negative keyword management to the campaign level.

This means that you can add negative keywords not only to the ad level but also on the campaign level.

This must be part of the big upgrade that adCenter411 posted in WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

This is great news for adCenter advertisers who want to have more control on their advertising campaign.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, WebmasterWorld, and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Despite warnings in the news that E-commerce sales are slowing down, there remains a steady army of creative, new online businesses ready for customers. Not everyone has a huge company with staffs for marketing, programming, and design supporting the endeavor.

Going it alone is part of the experience for some site owners.

Two women, sole owners of two new sites with big dreams, provide a perfect example of the joys and fears of selling products and services online. One is from the USA, the other from the UK. Both women have put their hearts and souls into their sites and are in the "now what?" stage.

Pegog.com, owned by Christina Jones, has approached Cre8asiteforums for help. She writes,

It's amazing how you can feel on top of the world one minute, and then really low the next. You then start thinking whether you have made the right decision

She's described what so many people feel, but smartly went charging after advice and support. Better to repair problems now and get to the bottom of potential roadblocks to sales.

Another discussion on marketing opportunities caught my eye, in How To Best Market A Great Interview I Got?. This site owner already owns several web sites, but has launched a new one. She has to start all over again, and this time, she's blessed with an interview so soon after the site's debut. How do you capitalize on that?

These two Cre8asiteforums threads help illustrate the challenges for small businesses who wish to sell online. Visit them for comfort or better yet, ideas for yourself.

The Google phone is finally here.

According to a WebmasterWorld thread, the Google phone will be hitting European markets this week and will be priced between $300 and $400. Other features include:

• Simlar sleek design to LG "chocolate phone"
• $300 - $400
• Google search hot key
• first time all 3 google major applications, search, email and maps, incorporated into phone
• MP3 player
• 2 megapixel camera
• Video phone
• Bluetooth

Will it beat the coveted iPhone?

so now its gunna be iPhones vs. phones with iGoogle on em? iThink should be interesting (lol).

Give it time. :)

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

According to numerous reports and a WebmasterWorld thread, Yahoo is rumored to be looking to acquire MySpace for 25% of its company stake, which apparently is equivalent to $12 billion.

With Yahoo's acquisitions of Flickr, del.icio.us, MyBlogLog, and Rivals.com, we're aware that Yahoo likes to involve itself in the social sphere. But we're not sure that MySpace is worth so much.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out and if Yahoo acquires the #1 social network, second to Facebook.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

It's interesting what people think up these days, but this wishlist item is actually a desirable product for advertisers. In a Search Engine Watch Forums thread, the possibility of creating a Google AdWords search engine is discussed, and personally, I think it's a great idea.

By now google must have a massive inventory of text ads, and growing every day. An "adwords search engine" would search this inventory and work like google - you enter a keyword and get back an SRP of all the (text) ads running on that keyword. Each ad would also show critical parameters, such as which network(s) it's running on, its geo-targeting and maybe the QS for the keyword.

The AdWords Search Engine would allow advertisers (and anyone else that's interested) to check out the worldwide ad market and competition.

That might just help you see geotargeted ads from another location and make advertising much easier.

There's a way to do it now, but it's just not very easy, according to the individual who suggested this innovation.

Limited Solution: Take keyword car as an example:

To find all ads on this keyword targeted to the United Kingdom click..
http://www.google.com/sponsoredlinks?q=car&gl=uk

To find all ads on this keyword targeted to the United States click..
http://www.google.com/sponsoredlinks?q=car&gl=us

To find all ads on this keyword targeted to London click..
http://www.google.com/sponsoredlinks?q=car&gr=GB-ENG&gcs=London

etc. etc.

It's hard work.

Shmuel is not as hopeful.

I think it's one of those nice ideas that we'll never see.

However, I think it will make the advertising experience much easier.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Let's say you're managing a pay per click campaign for an American client and you live in Canada. You need to get a good idea of the American competition on Google. One problem: you're only seeing ads targeted to your location, Canada. A High Rankings Forum thread discusses the options for circumventing this problem in greater detail.

For Google advertisers, there's also a way of viewing ads from around the world. The Inside AdWords blog says that you can append certain attributes to a URL to see the geotargeted ads.

...you can refine the results page by adding location attributes and values manually to the URL of the ad preview page. Optional attributes include a target country, longitude/latitude coordinates, regions, and cities. In the U.S., you can also set a target ZIP code or designated market area (DMA).

If you're viewing ads on Yahoo! or MSN, you can try a proxy server, according to Ian McAnerin, a Canadian.

Since the serving of geolocated ads are based on IP, you will not see any ads that do not include Canada while surfing from a Canadian IP.

One quick way around this (I'm a Canadian with US clients, too) is to use a proxy that has a US IP. I use Megaproxy, myself. They have a free version that will get the job done for you.

Previous Search Engine Roundtable coverage: Viewing Google AdWords Ads in Other Countries & Languages and Google Offers AdWords Advertisers a Preview Tool for Mobile Google Ads.

Forum discussion at High Rankings Forums.

A new DigitalPoint Forums thread is discussing a feature on Google Image Search that most people do not know about. Did you know you can restrict your searches of images to those that just return faces?

I did cover this news at Search Engine Land at the end of May based on a Google Operating System post.

To restrict your image searches by face only, append "&imgtype=face" to the end of the URL. Google should then show you a message that reads "Showing only images containing faces (show all images)." There is your confirmation that it works.

And it does work.

Test a search for q=rustybrick&imgtype=face versus just q=rustybrick. There is a clear difference.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Remember I was complaining that Advertisers Still Want More Impressions from Google Pay Per Action? Well, they got it. As I reported at Search Engine Land, Google has officially expanded the Pay Per Action test worldwide.

Google announced today the worldwide expansion of its pay-per-action advertising beta. Pay-per-action is a new pricing model that allows advertisers to pay only when a pre-defined action is completed on their site, such as when a user makes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter, or completes any other clearly defined action. Since the initial launch of the pay-per-action advertising beta in March 2007, many advertisers who have used the new pricing model are pleased with the opportunity to have more ways to promote their products and services online.

Google said:

Starting today, advertisers in the beta will see an alert in their AdWords account informing them that they can now create pay-per-action campaigns. Going forward, advertisers who have enabled AdWords conversion tracking and received more than 500 conversions from their CPC and CPM-based campaigns in the past 30 days will be automatically added to the beta on a rolling basis.

So now, I should see more "game" text ads after this word:

Learn more from out past article on Google Pay Per Action.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Yahoo has now implemented that all search ads descriptions are 70 characters or less. We knew this was coming for some time now and now it is here.

Yahoo has their official word on their YSM blog.

YahooPete has posted the announcement in the various forums including Search Engine Watch Forums, WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

The Amazon.co.uk blog made an announcement earlier this month that it has launched Context Links, a new contextual ad system. It appears that they've been thinking about launching contextual ads for quite some time.

By adding a snippet of code to a website, Amazon will highlight phrases with associated products in their marketplace and let users navigate to the Amazon website to purchase the item. This appears to be available in both the US and the UK, and for now, it is in beta.

This is what it looks like:

What do you think of these ads?

Hat tip to gabs.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Yesterday, Google announced on its blog that it acquired Zenter, a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations. The goal would be for "more sharing" and information collaboration, as the blog title suggests. Google has been planning to expand their family to presentations for quite some time when they announced their acquisition of Tonic Systems which allows for document conversion and presentation creation as well.

Discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint express similar sentiments. For one, this is a competitor to Microsoft Office, or as one calls it, this is the new "Google Office." After all, Google presentations was pretty much all that was left to complete their office suite.

Forum dscussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint.

A new WebmasterWorld thread has new reports of German webmasters receiving fake emails from Google that their site has been penalized.

Just a reminder, we covered this news in the past and that these are fake. Google said they would no longer send out email notifications until they find a more verified manner to notify sites of penalties.

Again, these are fake emails and should not be considered valid. To see if you have a penalty, login to Google Webmaster Tools and if your site is verified, Google will tell you.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We reported back in April that Yahoo publishers were leaving Yahoo for Google AdSense. Ever since Google took a stance on MFA sites, it seems like many publishers are giving Yahoo another shot, with their Yahoo! Publisher Network product.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has several publishers taking another look at Yahoo! They are finding that the relevancy of the ads are strong and now consistent and the earnings are getting better every day, relative to Google AdSense.

Yesterday, I could not believe it. On one page that I put YPN back on, they were able to serve THREE TARGETED ADS INSTANTLY, no refresh required. I refreshed a few times, and they STUCK (unlike a few months ago)! I tried another page - SAME THING! Another, SAME THING! So I kept going.

Let me try a sample live YPN ad right below this line, just to see:

Don't get me wrong, Yahoo just recently released their own form of smart pricing for their contextual product, they call it a new quality pricing model - where they received some criticism over but mostly praise from their advertisers.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

I know I am pretty much stating the obvious here, but there is a DigitalPoint Forums thread where Google AdSense publishers are discussing their click through rates for the search ads.

Some range as high as 7% as discussed in the thread. But some range as low as under a half of a percent. What makes for the difference?

Looking at my own data. I can tell you my personal blog received a much higher click through rate on its custom search engine then does this site's custom search engine.

Why? I believe because more normal people are visiting my personal blog versus this site. By normal people, I mean people who are not involved in search on a day to day basis. I have friends, family and random searches come to my personal blog. Whereas this site gets a lot of traffic from search professionals.

There can be many reasons why one site would have a higher click through rate (CTR) on the search ads when compared to the next. They include, but are not limited to, audience, design, type of search, traffic, layout and much more.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The 2nd Search Engine Strategies Latino event, run by Nacho Hernandez, was a hit. The event took place in Miami, Florida over the past two days.

Thanks to three volunteering contributors, we were able to provide coverage of eleven of the seventeen session that took place at the conference. A huge thank you to Carolyn Shelby from cshel.com, Dave Rohrer and Li Evans of Search Marketing Gurus for their tireless efforts in posting live blogging coverage of the sessions. Trust me, I know how hard it is to do this and I certainly appreciate it.

Here is our coverage:

• Introduction to Search Engine Marketing
• Tapping into US Hispanic and Latin America via Search
• SES Latino 2007 Keynote with Gonzalo Alonso of Google
• Search Landscapes: US Hispanics and Latin Americans
• SEM Campaign and Project Management
• Search Term Research & Targeting
• The Challenges Of Search Marketing To US Hispanics & Latin Americans
• Converting Visitors to Buyers; Persuasion Architecture
• Targeting Spanish/Portuguese Search Ads by Demographics & Behavior
• Search Marketing with Latinos: Roundtable
• Web Analytics and Measuring Success Overview

Pretty much everything you need to know about SEO and SEM for the Latino & Hispanic market.

Want pictures? Check out the seslatino Flickr tag.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The following was liveblogged at Search Engine Strategies Latino by Dave Rohrer.

Moderator: Jessie Stricchiloa, Founder, Alchemist Media Inc.

Speakers:

Todd Sarouhan, President, GoVisitCostaRica.com
Guiherme Gomide, CEO and Founder, Midia Digital
Alex Ortiz, Senior Specialist, Google Analytics

Alex

When Google decided to launch Analytics they thought they wanted to Provide content owners to see how users were using their site

Are you asking the right questions? Are visitors signing up on my site? Which marketing initiatives are the most effective? What do people do while on the site? Is the website design driving people away? Are the visitors signing up? Purchasing? Where do they abandon the free trial process? What keywords resonate with prospects and get people to convert?

What drives the best traffic? Email, Search, Banner, SEO, Affiliate programs, referrals

Where does Analytics fit?

Clicks, impressions, cost -> Analytics -> # of widgets bought, revenue
- Analytics should sit at the middle of any SEO &SEM work being done

Google Analytics
- Free hosted service
- Measure and evaluate ROI on your marketing efforts
- Evaluate visitor navigation to identify site improvements
- Track ecommerce metrics such as revenue, cost, and conversion rates
- Find and share the data to make informed decisions
o Dashboard overview and trending analyses
o Drill down into reports for greater detail
o Schedule emails of KPIs

Google analytics was originally designed for analysts and not everyone. The new version is all about helping you get to the data you need and sharing the data with coworkers.

Customizable dashboard helps you understand at a glance:
- what are my sources of traffic
- how am I doing on various search engines
- what are my top keywords for any period?

One click on the timeline and you can compare two different time periods to know if you are getting better or worse.

Getting started:
1. log into Adwords and click on Analytics tab
2. add a small JavaScript code to all the pages
3. Define your goal(s) and steps that lead to them

What are your goals?
- Ecommerce
o Visitors
o Transactions per visit
o ROI by product sales and keyword CPC
o Returning visitors
- Lead Generation
o User registrations
o Request for quote/information
o Funnel conversions, drop offs
o Case study downloads
- Brand/Product awareness
o Visitors
o Impressions
o Page views per visit
o Returning visitors

Convert more visitors to customers
1. 1st step - funnel
2. 2nd step - more funnel
3. 3rd – funnel again
4. Thank you for signing up.

Insights about all your keywords
- quickly segment your data and see performance
- you can easily get o
Take it for a spin and explore the tool on you

Todd

The problem – many pages weren’t converting
The solution – used Google Analytics to track and Web Site Optimizer to edit

The Problem
- in the month of may we had over 4300 landing page visits in the

The Solution
- we added 3 images of our featured hotels with a link to their featured listing.

Targeting Spanish/Portuguese Search Ads by Demographics & Behavior

Testing captions – tested them within
- Used Google website optimizer

Google Website Optimizer
- powerful and free
- tells you when you have
- 38% increase

Most websites have a conversion; it can be selling more products or gaining more leads

Guilherme

2 case studies to show today.

Web Analytics: Is everyone doing it right?
- very few companies measure results and even fewer take action based on web analytics
- the ones that say they measure: either have tons of data and do not analyze

Define what you want to measure
- people call it goals or KPIs
o sales
o forms completed
o navigation to a specific page

Case Study – Real estate

Problem:
- No extra budget
- SEM click volume did not grow
- Too much display advertisement, reduced SEM budget
- Client needed to increase audience

Action Plan:
- set up web analytics
- defined simple and straight forward goals
o online chats, forms completed, price visualization, apartment details visualization
- Monitored the campaign daily
- Geotargeting
- Set up bid management goals (not fully automated)

Results
- SEM campaigns had the lowest CPL
- Search engines are now responsible for 55% up from 30%
- Client achieved 140% of its goals for the year
- Reduced CPC costs by 75% and traffic up by 9 times

Case Study - Online Retailer

Problem
- no user base
- no history
- new website
- very tough competition
- no web analytics

Approach
- put Google Analytics on the site
- Defined the KPIs

Initial analysis
- high CPA
- high bounce rate
- low time spent on site per user

Data Analysis
- usability reviews/corrections – shopping cart, product detail page
- SEM campaign adjustments and fine tuning
- Changes in shipping policies

Result
- conversion rate went up 49%, average daily orders went up 700%

Take away
- you don’t need an expensive tool
- keep it simple, don’t choose too many goals or KPIs
- analyze it daily
- take real action based on your analysis
- Use the 90/10 rule – 10% of your time creating reports, 90% of your time analyzing and taking actions

Q: Is there any lag with Google Analytics?
A: Alex – it takes about 3 hours to see data. When you first start it will take 24 hours to really see worth while data.

Q: What other features of Google Analytics do you like that you didn’t mention?
A: Alex – really likes the geo location reports.

Q: Why is there a difference between Analytics and what the host say? What are the common reasons for differences between different Analytic packages.
A: Alex – thinks it’s a great question that he hears all the time. What’s most important is the trend and not the actual number. Each tool uses a range of technology and different data sets. JavaScript cant count robots, spiders and other things that log files can count. Robots and the like don’t run JavaScript so that could be part of it.

Search Marketing with Latinos: Roundtable
Landscape and Tactics Track
Tuesday, June 19, 2007 – 3:30p-4:45p

Moderator:
Nacho Hernandez, Founder and CEO, iHispanic Marketing Group

Panelists:
Rafael Jimenez, General Manager, Advertising and Publisher Group, Yahoo! Hispanic Americas
Andre Frugiuele, Sales Account Executive, Yahoo! Search Marketing Brazil
Bertrand Doux, Search Product Manager, Prodigy/MSN
Francisco Ceballos, General Manager Mexico, MercadoLibre
Lucas Morea, CEO, LatinEdge, Inc.
Brad Geddes, Director of Search, LocalLaunch.com
Martin Maslo, Founder and CEO, Resultics
Gustavo Ross, President and Co-Founder, Activ@Mente
Sarah Carberry, Senior Account Executive, Google, Inc.
Gonzalo Alonso, General Manager for Spanish-Speaking Latin America, Google, Inc.

(The conversation moves quickly. Each new paragraph is a different speaker.)

Where do you think this SEM industry is at in Latin America? Where is it going in the next 12 months?

Speaking as a buyer, the market is still starting. We only have 16% penetration... I guess the key point here is we’re just beginning. It’s not a mature market at all. I see a very good outlook going forward, but we’re just starting.

I think a year ago, people didn’t understand why they should be in the SM game, but now the clients are beginning to understand what SM is, and what kinds of objectives they can achieve. And probably the next three years they’re going to be spending more money to get better specific results.

It’s very difficult to define what SM is going to be in a few years, not just in the Latino market, but overall. Search marketing is being redefined all the time, so we don’t have a crystal ball and we don’t really know where it’s going to be in three years.

There’s more education needed to our webmasters, to get them to stop using flash, to help them understand how to organize their information to better make their sites crawlable so then there is more inventory for marketers to put ads on and the market will expand.

I think that SEM will have to converge with other types of IM tactics. On the other hand, we’ll have to not only think of KWs and text ads, we’ll be thinking about other types of interactive media… interactive television, etc. On the one hand, ppl will still be browsing and accepting passive content, but on the other hand there will also be more interactivity.

So when will we see AdCenter in Latin America?

We just launched in the US, and it’s still a young product. I’m sure it will be soon, but I can’t give you an exact date 

How many of you have laptops here? How many have wifi phone? (Many hands) This is where I think search is going… mobile. Look for more personalized search, more contextual based advertising. The penetration of the cell phones in the whole world is so much higher than the penetration of laptops. I think search is going to the phones.

Especially at Google, we’re making a concerted effort to make better user experiences, especially on mobile devices. How do we deliver relevant information that is exactly what the consumer is looking for. It could be not only text, esp. with universal search… imagery, video, etc.

In the spirit of debate, I think people overestimate what’s going to happen in two years and underestimate what’s going to happen in ten.

I’m sorry, one factor we have to look at is that the data plans on cell phones are used at a much higher rate than in the US. I’m really with the vision that search will be extremely strong on the cell phone. The future will be more towards voice recognition for search via cell phones.

There’s a lot of effort from the engines toward the semantic. The natural language also can be another frontier for the engines.

Some of the major obstacles to the growth of e-commerce right now are the banking issues, the lack of a dominant payment gateway in Latin America, and the delivery issues. Sometimes it takes a month for an invitation to travel via the postal service what can be driven in an hour an a half by car. Customers aren’t going to be willing to wait or risk the non-delivery of their product, and also they aren’t going to be willing to pay for an alternative means (Fedex, etc) due to expense.

Another issue is consumer confidence. In Mexico, for example, people do not buy airline tickets online. Partially because they’re less comfortable paying with credit cards, and also because they’re afraid their etickets won’t work at the airport when they get there. So they’d rather buy the tickets in person and have a paper ticket in their hand, than go for the convenience of purchasing a ticket online. Even when they do purchase a ticket online, they frequently go to a physical office location to have paper tickets printed for them so they can have them in their hands.

Ecommerce is not a roadblock to search marketing or selling online. SM is not just for ecommerce. SM should be a strategy or tactic to providing relevant content to people looking for it.

What do you think SEMPO should do in Latin America to help SM grow?

I’ve been in SEO for 10 years, and the biggest thing that drove my business with my clients was doing keyword research. So many businesses spend so much time finding new clients, when they should be letting the Internet tell the businesses why they need to be there and show them what new customers they’re missing by not being there.

So you’re saying SEMPO should be building/offering keyword research tools?

Yes.

Since I wrote the first mission statement for SEMPO… put together some sample presentation material. This is a problem all over, not just in Latin America. The one thing we don’t have is a sell job… a selling packet. Let’s figure out how to write an unbiased selling strategy. Let’s write it in Spanish. Let’s write it in Portuguese.

I think it would be great to have case studies by industry. Pharma, finance, etc. Something along those lines. Where people can access a library of information that’s applicable to their business. We need to show that search is driving people to the stores.

I think we should separate SEMPO Latino into SEMPO Latino and SEMPO Latin America. They are two separate markets with separate needs.

I have a two part question: what would you non engine people ask the engines to change? And then what about kick backs to agencies?

Fight, please!

I’d ask them for better pricing, standards and tools. We have to have two or three people with spreadsheets working on things. That’s time that could be better spent.

If I could say something to the engines, I’d say KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF MY CLIENTS. Don’t pitch my clients. Please remember the agencies are buyers.

Also, KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF MY EMPLOYEES. There is already a shortage of talent. Don’t poach my good people.

We’re going to have a serious problem in the near future with a talent shortage. SEMPO needs to help build the talent pool, or we’re going to be seriously fighting each other for a very few experienced SEMarketers in the not too distant future.

One thing that would help everyone out is a better understanding of how the data is being parsed. We need to understand the underlying raw (clean) data... the parsed data means nothing in a vacuum. We need the proper context to best use the data and reporting tools.

SEMPO needs to tap into the universities and schools.

This session at Search Engine Strategies Latino 2007 has been covered by Dave Rohrer.

Moderator: Nacho Hernandez

Speakers:

Matias Perel, Founder and CEO, Latin3
Brad Geddes, Director of Search, LocalLaunch.com
Johnathan Mendez, Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, OTTO Digital
Alexanre Kavinski, CEO, Hotlist Web Marketing
Eduardo Llach, CRO, CMO and Founder, SearchRev

Brad:

Laying the basics for PPC and targeting locals

Language Barrier
- Most common forms of Spanish language targeting
o English website, wishing to target Spanish speakers who know English

Many possible configurations of keyword, ad copy, and landing page

Where do Hispanics click stud
- While traditionally Spanish-language advertising was used to reach Hispanics, new data indicate second and third generation Hispanics tend to favor English – HispanTelligence

Recent Google data suggests:
- users who consider Spanish their primary language are much more likely to search in English
- bilingual Hispanics who consider Spanish their primary language also tend (to to 1 ratio) to click on English ads.

Google Adwords options

- language settings – under campaign settings
- keyword and and copy use – no restrictions as to the language of the keywords, no restrictions as to the langue of the ads, no restrictions of mixing and matching keyword and ad languages
- restrictions – none. Be creative
- Cautions – Quality Score: when using keywords and landing pages in two different languages, your quality score can suffer.

Yahoo
- keywords – allows English or Spanish
- ad copy – allows English or Spanish ad copy

MSN
- language – does not support Spanish or Portuguese
- new options under development

Geographic Targeting - Most common location targeting options.

Country Targeting
- Google – can use one account to target multiple countries
- MSN – can use one account to target multiple countries
- Yahoo – one account per country, through 2007 – transition of international accounts into panama interface

Common Best Practice
- max of one country per campaign, allows to see stats at least the country level.

What is regional targeting?
- display your ad to only a specific geographic area

Hispanic Target Markets

Top 10 markets – LA, NY, Chicago, Miami, Houston, DFW

Reaching a Local audience – GEO targeting vs. IP targeting

Types of geographic keywords
- state
- state abbreviation
- cities
- neighborhoods
- zip codes
- area codes
- counties
- airport codes
- regional lingo

Reaching y our target audience
- location – determine your target marker’s location
- language
- inventory – choose your desired ppc campaign

Johnathan Mendez
Shows amusing slide where he searched for “Latin America”.

Relevance
- Segmentation – divide your audience
- Targeting – Source: google, yahoo. Behavior – keyword and click
- Re-Targeting – visited before

Targeting ads to user intentions

Retirement Adgroup
1. retirement savings
2. retirement account
3. retirement information – actually the user is considering
4. retirement planning – actually the user is considering

Notice the stage the user is in the buying cycle.

Segmentation
- Behavior – new/returning, click path, referrer – ppc, direct, affiliate, environment – country, ip, browser, temporal – time, day, season

Google has the host language in the URL. Hl=es is where hl is the host language.

Case study
- 30k visitors
- traffic split
- over 95% confidence level on results
- A/B test
- Musicians Friend was the site

All they did was change the top ad banner from English to Spanish.

163% more users engaged with the Spanish language then the English.
47% more users that were displayed the Spanish tile/banner
7% more revenue per visitor

Targeting works
- segment, target, validate, improve performance

Alexanre Kavinski

Traditional Marketing
Planning based on behavior and demographics.
Search Engine Marketing
Focuses on “intention marketing”

Brazilian Online User
33.3 million web users – shows map breaking out the content

Factors that can effect traffic:
Holidays and Commercial Dates
Climate

Yahoo
- doesn’t have geo targeting and is unsure when they will.

Adcenter – no adcenter in Brazil.

Rich Targeting
- improve ROI
- set an abroad marketing strategy
- learn about your customers
- information to refine your campaign

Matias Perel

Languages used by Latin Americans and US Hispanics
Behavior, Interest & Attitude
- Consumer insights -> ad texts, landing pages, keywords
- Traditional campaign management
o Do like you always have, but add more in
o Add targeting for interest, attitudes and behavior
o Improve relevance and decreased CPC
- 15 month campaign and results have continued to be great.
o CPC down 31%
o CTR up 56%
Targeting US Hispanics
- when running a campaign for US Hispanics you should consider reaching your audience keeping in mind 3 main variables
- Experiment
o 3 different concepts, 2 groups of keywords (Spanish and English), 2 Ad text samples
o Best CTR came from Spanish text and Spanish keywords
o Spanish keywords also had a lower CPC

Speak their language, its cheaper and you’ll get better results.

Eduardo Llach

Variables in Optimization -

Traditional criteria
- keywords + language
- ad copy
- The landing page – how well it converts clicks to action
- what the ad says
- the search network they are search on Google, Yahoo, etc

Creative Optimization
- each keyword and creative combination will perform differently
- create very specific ad groups, small sets of keywords

Slide shows content and search split – content ads had a CPO of $77 versus $51 for Search.

Geo Targeting
- works using the ip addy
- country mapping is very accurate
- state mapping is 50% accurate
- city mapping is 30% accurate

Nationwide vs Top 10 metro areas
- similar ctr and cpc, but much higher conversion rate (2.1 vs .05)
- CPO for metro was $9 vs $45 for nationwide

Day Parting
- it pays to test it. Depending on the day the conversion rates will be in flux. Example had high conversion on weekends and low on weekdays

Fundamentals Track
Converting Visitors to Buyers; Persuasion Architecture
Tuesday, June 19, 2007 – 1:45p-3:00p

First Speaker: Jeff Eisenberg, Future Now, Inc.

Is everybody really full? No? Good. It’s hard to pay attention when you’re really full.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one can hear it, is there a sound? Who cares? If no one can hear it; who cares?

When we started our business in 1998, it was the time of the dot-bombs. At the time, everyone wanted eyeballs… as many as you could get. There was a belief that eyeballs had credit cards. Today, it’s search engines. Everyone thinks search engines and searchers have credit cards. It’s not getting the people to the site, it’s getting the people to actually buy. I’d rather have 2 visitors that buy, than 2 million who don’t.

Anemic Online Conversion Rates -- What we’re seeing now is, instead of conversion rates trending up, they’re trending down.

(Slide)
Shop.org State of Retailing Online 9.0
 3.2% in 2002
 2.4% in 2003
 2.6% in 2004
 2.4% in 2005
(/Slide)

In direct response, if you’re getting conversion rates like these, you throw a party. But you can’t compare DR to web. They’re fundamentally different, and cannot be compared apples to apples.

The Opportunity Cost Game – How much do lost opportunities cost your business per day?
(Showing slide from Overstock.com… a DVD landing page. 92% abandonment rate.)

When we think about optimizing a web site, we think about two different levels of opportunity. Persuasion (marketing) and conversion (buying). Persuasion is where the huge opportunities lay.

(Slide)
Eisenberg’s Hierarchy of Optimization (Pyramid)

Persuasive
Intuitive (Does it feel natural and doesn’t make me think?)
Usable (Is it user friendly?)
Accessible (Can everyone access it?)
Functional (Does it do what I need?)
(/Slide)

How to Set Up Persuasion Architecture
(Different Audience Types)
Spontaneous: seek top sellers and new releases, impulsive
Humanistics: care about reviews, emotional
Methodicals: investigate by genre, logical
Competitives: hunt for actor, title, etc.

It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic.

To Drive Persuasive Momentum
1) Who are we trying to persuade to take the action?
2) What is the action we want someone to take? (Macro vs. Micro)
3) What does that person need in order to feel confident taking that action?

Step 1- Define the conversion goals of your test
- What action do we want them to take?
- What page will we test?
- Where do we judge success (define success criteria)

Step 2 – Who are your Profiles?
- How many different types of profiles will you have that would participate in this campaign?
- How do they buy?
- Methodical, Spontaneous, etc..

Step 3 – Do the Creative
- Create the pages, PPC ads, emails or advertisements (online and off)

Landing Page Optimization
- A/B vs. Multivariate ( http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/ )
- Section Test ( Just test one small section, but tested 5 variations plus control)

7 Formulas to Online Success

1) Product Images Tell a Story – Make sure the picture tells the user all the information the user needs.
2) Test Headlines.
3) Calls to Action – Get Them to Click
4) Point of Action Assurances
5) Make It Obvious and Expected
6) Don’t Make Them Wait – Speed of site… slim down the file sizes for images to speed the load.
7) Does Your Site Stink?

Jared Spool: “… a web page can do only one of two things: either it contains the information you want, or it can get you to the information you want.”

Studying drop-off data indicates that would be customers visiting your site lose the relevant “scent” of what put them on the trail to your site; without that scent, they are unmotivated to go on.

Buyer’s Behavior and Modeling

 It’s not about what, but why
 Understand your customer’s motivation and tailor the message specifically to address those customer’s wants and needs. When you have multiple types of customer “types”, make sure that wording and imagery speaks to each type to keep them interested and pull them down the “information scent trail” right through to conversion.

Second Speaker: Eduardo Valades, President of iHispanic Marketing Group

Top Optimization Strategies for Herramientas de Produccion’s Website:
- Creative Keyword Research + Information Architecture
- Unique Titles and Meta Tags on all pages
- Content, content and more content
o HTML text, NOT text on images and NO FLASH
- HTML code design issues that have impact
- Other “off-page” considerations
- Link Analysis
- Web Analytics Software -- Tracking is everything
- Precise Conversion Strategy: Call to Action

Optimization Achievements
- Easy access to all product categories
- Clear and clean background
- No Flash
- Attractive pictures
- Numerous calls to action
- Created 400 pages of content, all of which is now indexed
- Well structured website
- Fresh content with news, events, expo information, etc.
- Improved the relevance of pages about products
- Increased online request conversion rate from 0.5% to approx. 6%

Additional recommendations by Future Now, Inc.:

PRODUCT PAGE
-- Change of text color from blue to black and hyperlinks in blue underlined text
-- Move “Solicitar cotización” button from the left to the right, more prominent, and above and below the product description
-- Button should say “Request quote and find out if its the product for you” OR “Request quote and we’ll contact you immediately”

CONTÁCTENOS PAGE:
-- Elimination of every field that is not absolutely needed
-- Informing users about how long it will take to get back and how they will get back
-- Centralization of the “Enviar” button and its graphical representation
-- Testing of buttons like “Please contact me” OR “Send now and we’ll contact you in X hours”

One of the biggest problems our clients have is that they don’t have in place the infrastructure and support systems to handle the influx of new leads/orders/customer calls. To maximize ROI, you have to make sure that there the capacity to respond to the rise in customer requests/orders/etc in a timely manner.

Questions and Answers

Q: What page elements are the most important to generate conversions?

JE: Design is something ppl have known about for a really long time. Look at heatmaps. There’s a rule of threes. Divide the page up like a tic-tac-toe board. It’s the corners and edges that people tend to notice. We’re not symmetrical, so it’s the things on the periphery that we notice the most… not always things right in front of us. Also, higher contrast and brighter colors tend to make clearer what the user is supposed to be doing. They understand the call to action better.

If you integrate Google Checkout into your AdWords campaign and have the Google Checkout badge displayed in your Sponsored Results, is there a way to track what keywords led a user to click on the Google Checkout badge? In a Google Groups thread, that question is asked.

However, I really want to know which keywords are leading to purchases. Is this possible using the simple Google Checkout "Buy Now Buttons"?

The answer is no, unfortunately, according to Deborah of the Google Checkout Team. She writes:

Currently, you can't use AdWords conversion tracking with Google Checkout "Buy Now" buttons. If you've integrated via the Google Checkout API, however, you can use Analytics to track buyers through your checkout process. More information on using Analytics with Google Checkout can be found here:

http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/developer/checkout_analytics_integration.html

Why doesn't Google Checkout work with Google AdWords? That makes no sense to me. I hope that this is a work in progress for the Google AdWords and Google Checkout teams.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Time and time again, people ask the obvious question about Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. This time, it comes from members at Cre8asite Forums. Member John asks, "With the removal of humorous "Ads by Gooooogle" and the era of personalized search (iGoogle) is the removal of the "I'm feeling lucky" button eminent?"

In reality, I don't think many people use that button nor do they see a point to it. (I'd love for Google to post their statistics on its usage!) Judging by the comments on the forum, some people have never even tried it. It's sticking for branding purposes, though I think the term "Google" suffices as a brand and is pretty sustainable in and of itself.

Some have, however, and obviously are dissatisfied with the results:

I have used it a few times and was disappointed that the 'feeling lucky' always meant the No.1 in the results. I was expecting a random selection.

Sort of like StumbleUpon? That would be pretty neat.

Or well-educated Google users just don't need it anymore or never bothered being curious about it:

I guess the consensus is that once you know how to Google, you don't use the "I'm feeling lucky" (anymore)?

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

In a WebmasterWorld thread, an advertiser is concerned at the way Google is handling some of his AdWords keywords. It appears that Google AdWords is serving customers with a common denominator keyword even though the customer did not actually bid on that keyword alone.

The advertiser was bidding on keywords that all seemed to have one word in common (he uses a play on the keyword, "widget," as an example). That one word became a keyword that Google began serving ads for in the broad match sense. When he wrote to Google, they replied:

It is possible for two-word keywords to expand to one-word keywords if that one word is highly relevant. In my case, they said "widget" had a 4% CTR and therefor Google judged this to be highly relevant to its users. They also suggested I use the negative exact match -[widget]

The advertiser is in a bit of a dilemma. He'd have never discovered it if he didn't check his web logs. He wonders why Google reduces keywords to a single term and now is making the advertiser explicitly state that they have to find negatives for broad matches that they're not even bidding on.

If I were him, I'd be concerned too.

One user proposes the following:

1) we look for ways to expand the "broad term gone wild" then we add those keywords and negatives and remove the broad term or convert it to phrase match. using google's keyword tool is a great way to see what google is "thinking" when someone types in that broad keyword

2) we also use negatives in our other adgroups for our keyword themes to force Google to distribute our ads matched with the appropriate keywords.

But really, why should this be the responsibility of the advertiser? I'd think (and hope) that most advertisers have done pretty thorough keyword research when using phrase or exact match and would certainly not want those broad match keywords to show up in their ad campaigns. These terms are likely not going to convert for the advertisers.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Previous Search Engine Roundtable coverage: Expanded Broad Match Hurting AdWords Advertisers and Protecting Yourself from AdWords Expanded Broad Match.

As a result of some questions asked at SMX two weeks ago, the Microsoft adCenter team has clarified its position on trademarks. In a blog post on the adCenter blog, the adCenter team writes:

With this policy advertisers are required to agree that they will not bid on keywords, or use in the text of their advertisements, any word whose use would infringe on the trademark of any third party, or would otherwise be unlawful or in violation of the rights of any third party.

Exceptions to the rule apply, however, if you are authorized to resell the trademarked product, you are providing information about the trademarked product, and you are using any trademarked term in its ordinary dictionary form and are not selling the product (e.g. apples the fruit vs. Apple Computer).

Additionally, the blog post adds that there are three types of dynamic text parameters that can be used in any adCenter campaign:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

My first question in my mind was how much is Google losing from this eBay move?

Only Google and eBay know the true number but as Greg Sterling reported via a Mediapost piece and as Brett Tabke noted in the WebmasterWorld thread, eBay spent about $26 million monthly on Google AdWords in the U.S. market.

That translates to $312 million annually. That is not a small figure. But Google's stock has risen almost $15 buck since eBay's move. So I suspect this does not bother Wall Street.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reported a bug a couple weeks ago with Google AdWords. Typically, when you log into your AdWords advertiser console and you adjust the columns to sort by a specific column, those changes would be remembered. That is no longer sticking.

Keep reverting to cost, with zero cost ad campaigns at the top. Normally when you change the column sorting, Google remembers.

Mine keeps going back to AVG CPC in ascending order. I keep changing it back to AVG CPC descending order but it won't remember it.

This bug has been lingering on for a couple weeks with no word from Google on this. AdWords advertisers seem extremely frustrated and upset with this bug.

Very annoying.

It's still happening. Annoyed

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

About a month ago we reported that Microsoft adCenter Conversion Tracking Turned Off Automatically. The bug continued to linger and linger.

Finally, last night, adCenter411, Microsoft's official adCenter representative, has confirmed they found the issue of the bug and fixed it.

Hi everyone,

I got word from our Support team that they isolated this issue and fixed it - the fix was verified on 6/15.

If you see this happening again for you, please let me know. Thanks for your patience with this, and I apologize for the inconvenience.

--adCenter411

Confirmations of the fix seem to be already coming in. But why did it take one full month to fix?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A short WebmasterWorld thread has some good nuggets on the level of traffic you should expect from a normal Yahoo! Search Marketing campaign relative to a Google AdWords campaign.

WebmasterWorld member, WebFusion, posted his confusion over just under 3% of the traffic he gets from Google with his Yahoo paid campaign. He explained how he used the exact same campaign, keywords, ads, ad copy and so on that he is using at Google AdWords plus he is bidding more at Yahoo. The ads have the same position in the search results as well. But he only received 25 visits per day from Yahoo, but he received 750 a day from Google.

Both shorebreak and Skibum, a WebmasterWorld moderator (Elis), explain that what WebFusion is seeing, is not the norm. Typically, Yahoo should send you about 20 - 25% of the traffic Google is sending you. But this can vary widely by industry. Skibum explains;

2% is about what one would expect for Ask.com give or take a percent or two. MSN around 10% and like ShoreBreak said, around 20 - 25% for yahoo! but it can vary widely by industry.

I would love to see more feedback in that thread and if you noted what industry it was, that would be even better. I know that organically, Ask.com send me more traffic than Yahoo did this past month - and we are included in Yahoo! News.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Last night I frantically kept on updating my post named Yahoo's CEO, Terry Semel, To Be Replaced By Jerry Yang on Search Engine Land. The news came out in dribs and drabs from several different sources. Soon, it became clear, how the new Yahoo will be organized.

Terry Semel, Yahoo's CEO, has stepped aside to give stockholders and Yahoo users want they want - a new CEO. Yahoo's co-founder, Jerry Yang is taking over the CEO position, with Susan Decker is promoted to President from executive vice president. The statements are now all out and the Techmeme coverage is overwhelming.

Here is a roundup of the larger reports:
- Yahoo! Co-Founder Jerry Yang Named Chief Executive Officer is the press release
- My new job is Jerry Yang's blog post at the Yodel Anecdotal blog.
- Semel Steps Aside as Yahoo CEO from the Wall Street Journal is one of the original places to break the story.

Again, you can see all the coverage at Techmeme.

Danny clarified that Yahoo has no plans to bring in a new CEO. They believe Yang is the man for the job, since he understands Yahoo better than anyone else. I am for that.

My big question is how will this impact you guys, the SEOs and SEMs, in the short and long term. We have Panama, will Yahoo release more features for it soon? We have Yahoo! Search which has not really seen much excitement recently. Will Yahoo now begin to make things happen with both? Don't get me wrong, Panama is a huge undertaking and investment - and they have done a good job with that. But the Yahoo! Search side seems to be lagging behind.

I suspect Yahoo to quickly come out with some technology announcements to back the managerial changes that just happened. Or at least, I would hope Yahoo would back the management changes with technology changes. The question is, in which parts of the company will we see it?

There are many wishes from the SEM community in the forums. Most focused around the YPN product.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Cre8asite Forums, DigitalPoint Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.

The following is coverage of the Search Engine Strategies conference by Dave Rohrer.

The Challenges Of Search Marketing To US Hispanics & Latin Americans

Not convinced that US Hispanics and Latin Americans are a market you should be targeting through search? This session examines some of the challenges you'll need to face as well as solutions to consider. It sets up issues and solutions further explored in the Tactics session on Day 2.
Moderator:

* Nacho Hernandez, Founder and CEO, iHispanic Marketing Group

Speakers:

* Matt Williams, Vice President, Prominent Placement
* Emerson Calegaretti, VP of Client Development, Latin America, Acronym Media
* Lucas Morea, CEO, LatinEdge Inc.
* Alexandre Hohagen, Country Director for Brazil, Google Inc.

Lucas Morea

Going to talk about Monografias.com – Monograph: a detailed and documented treatise on a particular subject. The site was started 10 years ago to help bring Spanish content to the web.

- 1 million daily visitors
- 200k content pages
- 3.5 million subscribers
- Top 10-30 in Spanish sites worldwide

A few notes on Latin America

A Challenge
- fewer users
- most are newbies

An Opportunity
- Plenty, and growing fast
- A very captive audience

Latin America is still a few years behind. The average # of keywords per search is much lower and again, behind the USA.

Google leads in USA, but REALLY leads in Latin America. The lowest penetration in Latin America is in the 70% range.

*back to Monografias

Content brings users, when you facilitate users to bring content you get this virtual cycle. It takes some effort to get it started but once it picks up speed it gives you all sorts of great things.

The content brings member relationships, member loyalty, then word of mouth promiton and activity increases.

The Users bring marketing opportunities and supply more content for deeper content for the users to visit.

Our SEO Philosophy
- the site was built with SEO in mind from the start
- Not much was done, the site was simply built with helping search engines understand the site

Highly searched words….. *gives quick lists of some keywords*

Build a solid SEO structure
- the trick is to be methodic way of building the site
- use keywords in urls, and text links, use breadcrumbs, don’t have “click here”
- the content management system use to use “great” links but they weren’t search engine friendly and improved the internal linking with keyword urls. It had a very positive effect.
- Over time, did interlinking. Added linked keywords to relevant content.

Help your content be unique
- Allowed comments and debates to take place on the article

Accents? Google handles the accents differently.
Use unaccented keywords in places users wont read very carefully
Words that have to have the accent that don’t, are wrong. Use the accent.

Duplicate Content
- If others copy content from you:
o Don’t worry. Show you are the original source by adding more. Add comments, add more to it. If people are copying you, you should be flattered.
o Pick your fights. Someone registered a typo of the domain and copied the entire the site. Using blackhat techniques they tried to overtake the main site. Using the WIPO they took on the other site and were able to secure the domain.

Less control in the future - *shows some Universal Search examples* Images, Videos, and News are being shown along with the normal results. With all of this, don’t worry about SEO. Build it in, educate everyone so that is just becomes something that everyone does.

Ask.com – doing the same changes. Do a search for “Shakira”, its more of a portal then a search engine result page.

Tips
- build SEO into your structure, write guidelines for your team to follow
- don’t aim “to be #1”, aim to bhe the authoritative site. Own your niche.
- Heave a link strategy with YOUR USERS in mind. Make your site worth linking to.
- Define your target and stick to it, but LISTEN to your audience.
- Expand your channels and optimize all your online media.
- Learn tools and methods. Tweak and revise periodically, focus on your site.

Matt Williams

Gives background on Prominent Placement

After 3 years were able to convince a company to jump into Spanish market

First dedicated international effort for either organization
- no previous exp with developing non-English programs
- funding – was mid year and hard to get the budget
- knowledge base – very little published in English on the subject
- Familiarity with the international search landscape
- Limited access to fluent Spanish/Portuguese linguists/copywriters

Can a successful English-language program be “translated” to Spanish and Portuguese?

US/English strategies/tactics
- ppc
- site optimization
- linking
- online press release

Intent
- Drive targeted traffic
- Customer acquisition

Opportunity Assessment
- an ability to be visible in the search engines
o was hard to do, there was no competition at the time
- determine the level of performance

Knowledge of Search Landscape
- Search engine share of market, know where to focus
- People search in a form that is most individually relevant. Ex. English, Spanish, Portuguese or whatever the native language was

Things that are the same: Tactical

Site Optimization
- search term selection
- effective on and off page elements

Content Creation
- grammatically correct
- relevant
- unique and compelling

PPC
- watch your metrics
- finding/refining tail terms
- testing creative

Institute a Process
- benchmarking results
- ability to monitor/measure cause and effect
- adjust as necessary

PRWeb/ Off-site Content
- additional SERP opportunity due to optimized content
- linking – authority site, anchor text with keywords. Got the press release on a big IT authority site.
- branding opportunity
- additional reach – RSS feeds

Effective Project Management
- planning
- scheduling and logistics
- budget and resource oversight

Shortage of SEM talent
- Experienced, knowledgeable search marketers in short supply among English-speakers, even more so for those fluent in Spanish.

Level of Sophistication
- competitors – only were able to compete in paid. American competitors were just using Adwords to show up in Latin America
- Tools – have come along quite a bit. The tools had didn’t have the volume so nothing would show up.

Project Management
- additionally complexity – didn’t speak Spanish so there was additional costs and time to work with translation companies. 30% more work required due to the extra translation costs

Things that are different
- Additional credibility
o Extensive pre and post sale resources
o Tech support
o Warranties
o International expertise
 Shipping
 Customs brokerage
 Currency exchange
o One stop shop
- PPC
o Competitors
 Country specific and localized campaigns
o Language
 Campaigns were difficult, more words to say the same thing in non-English ads
 Tail terms – discovering regional, and colloquial differences
 Non-US/English words, acronyms, brands, and/or model numbers.
 Misspellings & “Spanglish”
o Creative

Seasonality and World Events
There are differences between Southern and Northern hemispheres, business cycles, elections, sporting events, festivals, holidays and etc.

Shows graph of sporting events, presidential election, and holidays effecting traffic levels.

Results

- Did no linking or article/white paper distribution
- Did do SEO, PPC, and online press releases

Slide shows how the site owns many to most of the top 10 results. In Google ES they have 7 of the 10 spots. Spanish and Portuguese speaking visitors increases +510%. $2.2 million potential new revenue in sales… with $3 million in the pipeline all for the cost of $3000.

Strategy is universal – visibility, drive targeted traffic, increase revenue

Nacho thanks for a great case study.

Emerson Calegaretti

Was the first guy for Google in Latin America. Now is with Acronym Media.

Customer Mental Dictionary – radio, newspaper, magazines, TV, direct mail, viral marketing. From these messages we create a mental dictionary based on what we need and want. What a search marketer does is tries to translate what a person has in their mind to words.

What is search marketing?
It is keyword-driven marketing. To go from wanting a “plumber” -> from demand to offer -> getting a plumber

Steps: Keywords –> Text Ads –> Landing Pages

84 million potential consumers – Comscore Media from April 2006
52% English, 27% Bilingual, 21% Native

Overall Marketing Strategy – is similar from a high level for all languages. You want to see the users interact with your brand in a constant way. The more localized you go, the more custom you have to be.

Pay attention to your translation and the several shades of gray. South California is Mexican, Florida is Cuban, New York is again different.

Phase 1
- Build a short keyword list in Spanish.
- Develop Spanish landing pages optimized with these keywords
- Run a PPC ad campaign. Both Spanish/English text ads. Track time spent and conversion and CTR. Compare with English PPC campaigns and landing pages. You will need 3 versions of Spanish Landing Pages to do it right and test them.
- Analyze traffic from organic results on the landing pages. Track where the Spanish keywords are driving users to. Use your web analytics and look into the keywords that your users are using right now.

Phase 2
- Consider professional website localization. This is very important. Know the local area you are moving into and get help to do it right.
- Organize multilingual/country SEO and PPC management
- Do your global marketing strategy with a local touch. Don’t change your logo, just adapt your message.

Cooking recipe: test then invest. What can we learn from the test?
- Which keywords are hot in Spanish? Use CTR, time spent, and conversion rate to measure this.
- The best combination of ads/pages to keywords (Spanish keywords and Spanish pages, or English keywords to Spanish pages or English keywords to English pages)
- Translate or redesign the landing pages. Depending on your results you will have to do one or the other.
- What products/services are more attractive to this audience

The following live blogging post comes from our friend Dave Rohrer.

Search Term Research & Targeting

The bedrock to success with search engines is understanding which search terms to target. Fail in that and your audience may never find you. Where do you find keyword suggestions in Spanish? This session covers ways to undertake search term research that is crucial to succeeding with your search engine marketing efforts, whether that be via free or paid listings.
Moderator:

* Jessie Stricchiola, Founder, Alchemist Media Inc.

Speakers:

* Sylvio Lindenberg, SEM & Center of Excellence Manager, Media Contacts Brazil
* Sarah Bernier, Spanish Language Search Marketing Consultant, FindLaw - A Thomson Company
* Larry Mersman, Vice President, Trellian Software
* Liana Evans, Search Marketing Manager, Commerce360

Larry Mersman

Example: Needmorebeer.com

German Beer – 9853 searches
Beer [from] germany – 49 searches

Looking to New Markets

Trying to add new product categories and marketing tot hat demographic can create new keyword challenges. Adding Latin brewed beers means finding keywords that will get you found in all markets.

Compiling Keywords Lists
- KeywordDiscovery.com – Shows how to use the tool and how to read the results.
* Regional options – has Spanish, Portuguese, access to Overture info as well.
Expanding your Lists

Related Search Terms

Identify alternate spellings, the most common spelling and typing mistakes.
- 9.7 million searches for “accommodation”
- 1.7 million for “acommodation”

Learning from your Competitors
- Keyword Density analyzer break down page content into a list of unique words and phrases

Tool: Competitive Intelligence
- Competitive Intelligence enables you to identify your competitor’s top performing PPC keywords

Sylvio Lindenberg
1. Research
a. Look for:
i. Client’s business
ii. Products
iii. Read the content
iv. Some keywords and synonymous
v. Site’s objective
vi. Market
vii. Target audience
viii. Region
ix. Seasonality
x. Etc.
xi. Knowledge and a first draft of search terms will come from this
2. Gathering
a. Grow your list
i. Search Engine Tools
1. Google Adwords
2. Yahoo/Overture tool
3. Miva (especially for Europe)
ii. Paid tools
1. Keyword Discovery
2. WordTracker
iii. Be creative and use alternative sources
1. Go to CJ.com or Linkshare and see what keywords advertisers allow affiliates to use
iv. Keyword variations, synonymous, plural, misspelling, geographic, etc.
v. Yahoo Answers – can be a very good source to see what people are calling things.
3. Selection
a. Use the parameters and be wise to find a balance
i. Search volume
ii. Competition (difficulty / frequency)
iii. Just use your common sense and include terms related to the client’s business (brand, industry related vocabulary)
4. Filtering
a. Less is more
i. Using the parameters and specific tools to identify real search habits
1. Focus
2. Relevancy
3. Volume
b. Can use Google Trends to assist with filtering.
c. Use your web analytics. You can use it to see how people get to your site, and what content people are NOT finding.

5. Definition
a. The last word is always the client’s word.
b. We know search but they know about their business.
c. They are the ones in contact with the final client on a daily basis…. The client is always right

This is a cyclical and continuous process – for evaluation and action

The search term selection is one of the most important phases but the structure cant be ignored in order to make the entire content crawled

This is a constantly changing environment (internally and externally) and the keywords needs to reflect these changes
- Search habits
* Two studies
-- Rankstate.com Jan 2007 Survey. 28% use 2 words, 27% use 3 keywords, 17% use 4 keywords and 13% use 1 keyword
-- Onestat.com from Feb 2007. Showing July 2004 to July 2006. Short searches are declining and the number of longer searchers are growing
- New content adding
- Competitors

Jessie brings up a Fact.

- At a conference last year John Smart gave a keynote and presented data on search queries. In 1999 the average of search words was 1.6, Google recently gave the number of 3.6, and John had said that in the next 5 years the # would double again.
- His prediction that after the 5 keyword level we will jump to 11 keywords. 11 words is the average number of words that people use to ask someone a question.
- This brings up the future of search and how eventually we will interact with search engines just like we do with humans (in terms of asking questions)

Sarah Bernier

Gives FindLaw.com background of services.

Optimization of Custom vs Translated content
- translation of existing material
* we don’t perform keyword research
-- hard to “keyword stuff” with translation
-- create meta data after the fact
* still optimized but not like customized content
-- translators don’t focus on SEO; keywords might not necessarily be those we’d choose.

Custom Content
- perform keyword research
- straight translation vs. original research of keywords
* can choose most appropriate and/or utilize synonyms
* custodia de Ninos / Menores vs. custodia de hijos
* Danos Corporales / lesions personales
- create meta data from scratch around which to build pages

Keyword research Tools
- Is the data source Us or Global?
- How rich is their data source for Spanish-language search?
- Many tools with US databases show ‘Spanglish’ and Spanish misspellings, but we do not add such terms into content
* Right now those “keywords” are showing up in our analytics
- We don’t research keywords with accents; little to no results
* Web users don’t “generally” use accents – keyboard issues
- Use keyword research tools s GUIDES only
* In English keyword research, we look at relative numbers of searches, and assume the reported number gives an idea only
* In Spanish keyword research we cannot even assume proportions are accurate.
* Experiment, then use your analytics to make final decisions.

Keywords and Special Characters
- to use or not to use accents
- majority of search engines recognize them
- use grammatically correct meta data
* “call to action” / conversion
* Shows professionalism / knowledge of language

Linking between pages of a site
- Spanish-English or only Spanish-Spanish?
* If not all relevant practice areas(topics) are written in Spanish – offer information in the other language or opt for monolingual areas of site?
* Measure weight of importance of information against loyalty to one language
* Add “disclaimer” after links to English content
- Spanish keywords / phrases are longer
* Link text and navigation tends to be longer
* Effects the user experience…. But can be difficult

Inbound links to site
- keywords in anchor text need to be specific to the site/page to which they’re pointing
- if more then one language represented, should have relevant inbound links for each

Use geographically-specific terms
- professional services
- qualified traffic vs. quantity of traffic
- doesn’t affect e-commerce as much

Lack of competition on Web
- depends on subject matter – Spanish language legal information is still scarce in US
- May show up for broader searches than those targeted

Spanish vs English Content
- newly releases sites with both English and Spanish content show searches right away for general Spanish terms.
- English results for name-only or VERY VERY specific keywords
- Spanish content unique
* Initially performs at a higher level than English counterpart
* Appears more authoritative

Liana Evans

No matter what language, keyword research is fundamental
- gives insight into your market
- understand what your competitors are doing
- understand who your competitors are
* do you have the same competitors online as you do offline?
- discover niche market opportunities

Keyword Research

- Utilize tools that give more than monthly results so that research is not biased or skewed.
- Research how many searches are done on a keyword over the past year.
- Understand your keyword
* Sandals – the resort or what you wear on your feet?
- Niche Markets
* Instead of Sandals, try Open toe sandals
- Know your audience
* Synonyms
* Jargon
* Country/area specific
* Common misspellings

Misspellings and Negatives

Example: recipes, sesame street

Negative (for PPC)
- Example: Avenue (-candy bar, -street, -road,-song)
- TriplePlay ( -baseball, -base ball)

General vs Converting
The phrases will give you where they are in the buying cycle. Are they beginning, close to buying, buying now.

Tools

Free vs Paid

Free – Yahoo Overture tool, SEO Book Took, Google, MSN
Paid – Keyword Discovery, Hitwise, Word Tracker

Seasonality
- free tools give you only one month at a time
- think globally, summer in Brazil starts in December, Summer in Canada starts in June

Brands vs. Terms
- Example: Cable internet, phone & TV providers
* Optimizing for brand limits your reach
* Optimize for terms instead such as:
-- Servicio de alta velocidad del internet
-- Servicio de la tv
... And so on

Remember!!!
- use phrases rather than just one word
- free tools and the seasonality factor
- general terms vs terms that convert
- brand blindness
- fish where the fish are

Q: Where do the paid keyword tools get the information from?
A:Wordtracker has 4 sources and Dogpile is one of them. Trellian pulls from over 180 search engines. Hitwise has deals with ISP’s to track and obtain the information that they present.

Q: For someone starting out, what is the best tool to use?
A: Sylvio gave the analogy of buying a car. If you are buying a car for the first time you don’t buy a Ferrari. You buy a more common popular car and start. As you get more advanced and comfortable you move up the chain to more complex tools.

Q: Is there any way you can see what your competitors are bidding on?
A: Liana gave spyfu.com as a source that is free and cheaper then Hitwise. Larry: goes into Trellian’s Competitive Tool as a source but states that it does not give the costs of the clicks yet. Sylvio mentions Adgooroo that does a lot of what the person is looking for.

Q: Seasonal fluctuations, how is the data “predicted”?
A: Larry – if you are looking at the past year, it starts today and goes backwards. It doesn’t have future data and doesn’t predict. Sylvio suggests Technorati and Blogpulse to track mentions of your company or keywords you are tracking.

Q: How accurate is the Spanish numbers and English numbers for search tools?
A: Sarah: I don’t look at the number, look at the proportion instead. Look if the keyword is even being searched on, and you may just have to go with your gut. Track it in your analytics and see if you are really getting a lot of traffic – she goes back to her example of how the keyword tools said one thing but in the analytics they results were way different. Jessie adds: When doing research its gut and intuition. Back 10 years ago when many people were doing the same research there weren’t tools.

SES Latino 2007: Miami
SEM Campaign and Project Management
Monday, 1:45-3:15p -- Landscape and Tactics Track

Moderator: Nacho Hernandez, Founder and CEO, iHispanic Marketing Group
Speakers:
Martin Gallone, Marketing Manager, MercadoLibre
Frank Watson, Head Search Marketing, FXCM
Alexi Huntley, Anthropologist/Marketing Director, Naturegate
Paul D. Saffery, Managing Director, SilverDisc Chile

Nacho Hernandez

When you're dealing with the Latin America markets, it adds a several steps to the process of managing your SEM and Online Marketing campaigns. These speakers will be sharing their experiences and best practices for handling both your US and Latin America campaigns.

First Speaker: Paul D. Saffery

Account setup challenge --

Feasibility analysis
-- Is there enough search volume? When I go to fish in a river, I want to know how many fish are in the river?
-- How much ad competition is there?

Decide which site pages to target. Make sure:
-- You don't exclude any pages from your page universe (use a site map or create one by crawling your site).
-- Targeted pages are "near" the conversion page (not too many clicks to conversion -- one or two clicks at most).
-- Targeted pages are fresh.
-- Targeted pages are usable (download fast, uncluttered, make sure the ad is in the same language as the landing page).

Create keywords and ad copy for chosen pages:
-- Maximise consistency between target page content and keywords/ads.
-- Tag conversion pages. Both you and bid tools will need to measure your success.
-- Add referrer codes to destination URLs.

Put ad groups into campaigns. Keep in mind:
-- Shared daily budget management.
-- Shared targeted networks (search/content/both)
-- Shared targeted languages.
-- Shared geo-targets
-- Channel restrictions. For exmaple, max number of allowed campaigns, groups, keywords. All for future account growth!

Establish mapping between website pages and account....

Bid Management

- Define your key performance indicators (KPIs)

- Identify which areas of your account have a high impact on your overall KPIs (Pareto Law typically holds), and prioritise management of those areas.

- If you are using a bidding tool, make sure you choose one flexible enough to allow you to set and tweak your KPIs.

- Keep advertising channel API usage costs in mind. Make sure your bid management software takes API usage costs into account.

Ongoing Account Tuning

Necessary when:
-- New pages are added to the website and we need to market them.
-- Pages currently being marketed are removed from the website.
-- Pages currently being marketed change their content (price, product availability, special offer, etc)
-- Signs of change in competition. Watch avg position, volume of impressions, click-through rates (CTR).

We need to monitor website changes. Options:
-- Wait for client to inform us.
-- Compare consecutive feeds that contain the structure and key content of the website you need to market or...
-- Crawl the site and compare the new crawl to the old crawl.

Summary: The CM Cycle

(Graph -- see slides)

Speaker Two: Martin Gallone, Marketing Manager, MercadoLibre

Paid Search

MercadoLibre's Online Makerting is defined by 6 channels: Portals, Affiliate, Paid Search, Direct, Onsite, Product.

-- Paid Search marketing strategy: Increase qualified traffic generation to boost registrations and transactional volume.

-- Keyword Generation: What are qualified users looking for?
---- Use internal data, (queries, listings, common errors)
---- Use external data (trends, news, events, new products, seasonal items, localization)
---- Validate the KWs (check against policies, remove duplicates)

After defining KWs...

-- Trafficking Process
---- Targeting: Localization Language
---- Match Type: Keyword AdGroup
---- Creativity: Price Point, KW insertion generics
---- Landing Page: Home Page, Categories, Listings, Searches, Guides, Products, Promotions
---- Bid Management: Position Target, ROI Target, CPC Target

-- Bid Management Portfolio
---- Keywords and Campaigns
------ Position Target: Branding and Strategic KWs
------ ROI Target: Marketplace 90% of KWs, ROI based on Internal Metrics
------ CPC Target: Classified categories, Increase Traffic

Third part of process is Optimization...

-- Optimization: If we can measure it, we can fix it
---- For each KW, check if objective is achieved. (Nice flow chart on slide -- cshel)
---- If objective is achieved, derive additional KWs... if not, remove from list.

Organic Search

Just make sure that your site is user friendly and crawlable.
-- Put yourself in the user's shoes... all your user's shoes
-- Be natural... don't force your content for rankings. Think of the users.

Speaker Three: Alexi Huntley

History: Nature Air starts an e-marketing strategy in 2004 with New Media.

Goals: Redesign their website and optimize their website for keywords related to Costa Rica and the airline business, after the research they found a great audience looking for Costa Rica destinations. Also, make more $$$$.

Naturegate was established in 1990. The site was designed by an agency strictly for look and feel, no seo at all. Then in May 07, we implemented a booking engine and added it to the homepage. We also added some room for banners to help monetize the site. 25% of our market is local (Costa Rica).

This is something to be aware of... when the net you're casting into the ocean, you need to make sure your targeting is dead on. The size of your net in comparison to the whole ocean is very small and you need to pull in fish every time you cast your net.

When we relaunched out site, we focused on SEO/SEM. Our campaign involved 3 different sites and began in July 06.

Our team included three participants:
-- NatureAir's inhouse staff
-- New Media (Costa Rica) a team of Internet Marketing Analysts specialized in the development of the marketing strategies and Internet solutions.
-- SEO-PR (US) 40 years of combined experience managing PR for tech companies and PR for web companies.

Our team used web conferencing to manage new content development that balanced search engine optimization needs and cultural reqs and discuss next steps.

Our team also used ranking and traffic reports to review progress.

All 3 of the strategic decisions we made required our team to focus
-- we considered paid listings, but focused on organic
-- we have a network of sites, we focused on 3 of them
-- we identified 450 potential search terms, we focused on half of them

It's okay to fail, but fail soon and fail cheap.

Our SEO campaign tripled #1 rankings and doubled top 10 rankings over the last year.

-- In my experience, you need to quickly kill the naysayers. On the SE side, we (the marketing people) need this kind of information and slides to quiet the naysayers who can kill our projects (and our spends).

Visits to NatureAir are up 147% year over year to 8,313 per month.

Business impact of SEO campaign and project management.

Working together, our team has:
-- Maintained the quality of our sites
Increased #1 rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN from 12 to 39 and increased their top 10 rankings from under 100 to over 210 in just nine months.
-- Increased traffic to the sites to record levels.
-- Maintained look and feel of our local market, while maintaining the North American marketing aspects.

Where do we go from here?
-- W/ high organic listings on the current 3, we're free to move on to the rest of our properties.

Fourth Speaker: Frank Watson

How many people are doing in house marketing? (not many)
How many are looking to build an in house team? (even fewer)
Wow. Mostly agency people then? This should go quickly then as I wanted to talk about how to build a team. :)

Many businesses believe they don't need to go outside of the American market because there's a school of thought that that is where all the money is. However, there is still a significant amount of money in those other markets and you can be very, very successful there.

How many people here look at their analytics everyday? (very few hands -- I raised my hand though)
Wow. (sad sigh).

When you're branching out into new languages, there's more to translation. Yes, you can reach out; however, you have to be able to understand the replies... what comes back.

When you're developing your team, picking the right people is as important as picking the right keywords. If you find people with the linguistics, and you're strong in the mechanics, you can train the others and you complement each other.

The Team:
-- Knowledge of Organics
-- PPC Expertise
-- Copywriting Skills
-- Solid Web Designing
-- Advanced Analytics Experience
-- Some Programming Knowledge
-- Five Senses

Knowledge of Organics:
-- On Page Elements
-- Off Page Elements

Have a basic understanding of these concepts so you can interview properly.

PPC Expertise:
-- KW Selection
-- AB Testing
-- ROI Measurement
-- Engine Rules
-- Large and Small Engines

Especially in the Latin American market, your team needs to know which engines are performing and who has what market share in your specific market/locale.

Copywriting Skills:
-- Headline Writing (journalism background good idea)
-- Press Releases
-- Website Content
-- Email Campaigns
-- Nuances of Language

Solid Web Designing:
-- Linguistic Differences
-- Eyeball Tracking
-- Cultural Colors (Look at a site from Japan.. it looks like a teenage girl's bedroom... all pinks and blues)

Advanced Analytics Knowledge:
-- Tracking
-- Conversion
-- Dynamic Changes
-- Language and Geographic Stats

Some Programming Knowledge:
-- Javascript
-- Stylesheets
-- CMS functionality
-- CRM functionality

Know enough to be able to communicate effectively with vendors and other departments.

The Five Senses:
-- Sense of Humor
-- Sense of Comraderie
-- Sense of Purpose
-- Sense of Dedication
-- Common Sense

++ The skills can be combined into a team as small as two, but as the project grows, so should the team.

++ Reward Creativity

++ Constant Training

Have fun, if you have any questions, I'll be in the bar later.

Questions and Answers

Q: What is the relationship between SEM and PR? How do you use the PR companies for SEM?

AH: Very good question. We do use PR extensively, more of a traditional model. We have our local market which represents 25% of our business, then Europe and North America. Unfortunately, we have not yet linked out press releases to our sites or the blogs and what not to our sites, and we're in the process of implementing that right now. I hope that answers your question.

Q: How do you utilize the press for SEM?

FW: Don't think of it purely in terms of traffic. There's offline branding, and there's online inbound links, awareness and some click-throughs.

Q; News indexes pretty well. Is the press release focused more for brand awareness or for indexing?

FW: It's all together. You can't isolate them. Most "real" news won't have lots of links, but there are instances where a properly optimized press release can get you some really well placed stories and generate a lot of traffic.

Q: With the lack of credit card usage in Latin America, how do you do transactions?

FW: The problem with credit cards, and that's a very valid issue not only in Latin America but also in China. The number of debit cards in South America is increasing and you can use those just like credit cards. We had the same problem in the United States, and as the number of types of "electronic money" increases, so does your potential customer base. There are prepaid debit cards and bank cards now, you can get them from the grocery store.

MG: MercadoLibre has an escrow service similar to the one EBay used to have years ago.

Q: You were mentioning consumer confidence levels. Can you tell us more about the consumer confidence in Latin America in terms of using credit cards.

MG: Most credit card purchases in Latin America are for large, special purchases. The users are becoming more sophisticated, and as they become more comfortable with the credit cards, they begin to make more and more purchases with them.

AH: For an airline that is a low cost carrier, our main sales channel is our website, and the main method of purchase is the credit card. Originally, our marketing copy was more playful... european. However, when you're in the Latin American market, playful doesn't encourage people to use their credit cards to pay for airline tickets. We had to go for more corporate, bank styled copy to instill trust with the users.

The following liveblog comes from Dave Rohrer.

Landscape & Tactics Track
Search Landscape: US Hispanics & Latin Americans
How do Latino searchers in both the U.S. and Latin America interact with search engines? Do they have a preference in language when they search, as well as the search ads if written in Spanish or English? What about Portuguese speakers from Brazil? To fully engage these audiences in the learning process, particular attention should be given to gaining and maintaining trust. Greater acceptance will occur by search marketers if they are involved in the planning, delivery, and evaluation of these marketing efforts. This session explores the latest research and provides tips and tactics for search marketers to consider.
Moderator:

* Nacho Hernandez, Founder and CEO, iHispanic Marketing Group

Speakers:

* Marcelo Sant'Iago, Director, Business Development, MídiaClick - Performance Marketing
* William Alvarez, Marketing Manager & Team Leader, Torrenegra Internet Solutions
* Martín Maslo, Founder & CEO, Resultics
* Gustavo Ross, Interactivist & Founder, Activ@Mente

Nacho Hernandez, Founder and CEO, iHispanic Marketing Group

Nacho:
This is more tactical then the last session. This is more about what you can do to take more advantage of things.

William Alvarez – Marketing Manager & Team Leader, Torrenegra Internet Solutions

Based in NY offering web solutions.

How to reach your target without wasting money while targeting the Latin market.

5 Different Segments

- Spanish only
- Spanish dominant
* % 21 of US Hispanics are in the first 2
- Bilingual
* 28% of US Hispanics fall here
- English dominant
- English only

Spanish Preferred Segment

SEO
Pros: capitalizes local markets with lack of content in Spanish
Cons: internationally competing web sites (Spain and Latin America)

PPC
Pros: possible solution if you want to market on Spanish keywords without having a translated web site
Cons: AdCenter targeting capabilities limitations (e.g. Geotargeting)

Some US portals: Univision, Yahoo, Terra, Google

Bilingual Segment

SEO
Pros: your message is guaranteed, it will always reach your target. Increases opportunities.
Cons: requires an additional budget to maintain the same content offering to the market

PPC:
Pros sounds familiar, engages the target by using a common languages
Cons: mistreats the language and it might sound not-professional depending upon the main target.
Ways to match segments

Shows micocinalatina.com ranking for “three milk cake” in English and Spanish for each of the translations.

English Preferred Segment

SEO
Pros:?
Cons: ?

PPC
Pros: Seasonality. Each Hispanic group has its own set of values and traditions and we can take advantage of this to engage them.
Cons: *took slide down*

Acculturation models - It all depends on each particular situation. Each group celebrates their own holidays and events at different times. This is a way to segment a group from others.

Stats
Advertising to Hispanics in Spanish is significantly more effective then advertising to Hispanics in English.

Shows some stats from a study in 2006 and some stats from AOL.

AOL
- 68% in 2006, 51% in 2004. Internet is best source to make final brand decision for most online Hispanics.
- More then 77% of online Hispanics use the internet to learn about brands of products. 59% in 2004

Marcelo Sant’lago, Director, Business Development, MidiaClick – Performance Marketing

Opening remarks – apologizes for Latin accent. Hopes that in the next few years the conference will be in Portuguese and Spanish and translated in English.

Shows a photo of Orkut – a Turkish engineer who works for Google

Orkut – is THE social network in Brazil. 60MM+ unique users a month, 200MM+ page views a day

About – Prime demographic distribution
Targeting – contextual, site and placement targeting. Regional/local targeting
Ad Formats – Text-base ads for contextual targeting. Display for site targeting

CGM is great – Blogger, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, Orkut
Brazil is #2 in the world for internet use on You Tube, Yahoo Answers.

Photo of Chris Anderson – Long Tail

Long Tail and online advertising industry in Brazil
Fortune 500 use CPM Banners, RichMedia, and Video for the “best sellers”
SMEs use CPC/CPA banners, Paid Search, SEO for the long tail search terms

$176 million market – just over 2% of entire advertising pie.
113 million users, which is larger then many countries in Latin America
Brazil does not speak Spanish, but speaks Portuguese
Net Ratings show that 80% of Brazil users do a search everyday

Photo of John Battelle
“the database of intentions”

Think Reverse
Conversion then Budget

Budget -> Visits -> Leads -> Conversion

Leads to Conversion = CPA
Visits to Leads = CPL
Budget to Visits = Average CPC

Strategy: Keyword Matrix
Slide shows Neutral, Worst, Still need improvement, Best keywords. Shows which keywords are producing the most for you.

Personal Mantra: “Test, Learn, Evolve.”

Metrics to use: Impressions, clicks, click-through, Visits, Conversions, ROI

US is very metric based, Brazil doesn’t measure anything. Be sure to use a web analytics tool and measure. Free, expensive, just use something.

Success Case: Editora Abril

Objective: Selling magazine subscriptions
Media channels: uses CPC and display
1st sponsored links campaign to win ABEMD Award

Martin Maslo – Founder & CEO, Resultics

Nacho: Tells everyone to read his white paper. Martin put together the most important voices of Latin America.

Brings up that he would love to present in his own language, and looks forward to the day when he can.

Advertisers Spending Budgets
What can you buy with a dollar in Latin America?

Slide shows a list of flags and items that you can get for a dollar. Ex: you can feed a family in Argentina.

$1 = SEM Advertising. Shows CPC lists

Real Estate = $2.42, bienes raices = $.42
Credit card = $9.49, tarjeta de credito = $.90

Agencies can….. leverage display campaigns with search marketing using small extra budget……. Use smartly contextual networks and site targeting to reach large audiences at low costs.

Advertisers can….. be first movers can take over generic terms at low costs…. SMBs can compete head to head with large companies…… going Global with local products and services.

There are a lot of terms that small advertisers can get now, if you start now.

Few Local Players
Yahoo, Infobae.com, La Nacion, Prodigy, MSN, Terra, Es Mas, ClarinX
Not a lot of heavy traffic portals. CPM has risen, visibility has reduced. The opportunity then appears: SEM.

SEM -> vertical networks, content networks, site targeting/direct responses -> traditional CPM display ads

Instead of complementing display ads with SEM…. Complement SEM with display ads.

Communication
- email
- instant messenger – 32% of IM users use VoIP
- Blogs, 42% of users have a personal page, blog or are registered in a social network. 36% share photos.

50% of users have already purchased a service or product online.
60% of users purchase at traditional channels after doing some research on the web

Each area has a local opportunity. Different methods work better in different areas. Look for low CPC’s in one country compared to others.

Think locally specifically design your campaigns for the local market.

Dealing with our new customer: The Sales Manager instead of the Marketing Manager.
- shares passion for results
- measure the way the agency will be measured
- understands new SEM opportunity with no pre concepts
- breaks a traditional cycle
- understands that search marketing is not a glamorous way of advertisement but it is indeed a romantic approach for getting things done!!

Remember: by the end of the day, success will be measured, as in any other industry, in results.

Gustavo Ross – President & Co-Founder, Activ@Mente

Agrees about the English/Spanish translation that the other speakers have mentioned.

The Consumer(1.0) – couch potato
The Consumer(2.0) – wants when they want and actively seek it out

New brand <> consumer relationships

Past the brand communicated out, now it’s a give and take on demand when the consumer wants too. Past = communication, Present = interaction

Long Tail of Content
- Graph shows the big portals ranging down to smaller portals and verticals.
- Ranges from Massive to Niche to User Generated (smallest players)
- Shows how getting to the consumer it has gotten more difficult

Search in the Interactive Marketing Strategy
- Understand its tactical role(s)
* Tactical Roles
-- Direct response/ customer acquisition. CPC are easily measured. This is the easiest way to use search and the most primitive.
-- Brand building/awareness generation. Don’t have to have a clear call to action as you do with direct response. Example: “remodelar” search has an ad comes up that just links to an information page. The company gets 80% of its business from the web now.
-- Redirector/motivation catcher. Consumer is already motivated by other tactics. This is more for bigger brands who already are marketing. Search is the last link in the chain from the brand to the consumer. TV or radio drives a user and then does a search due to that promotion – search joins the consumer to the brand. Example: Duracell – has many channels and people are going online and searching for the promotion. The domain name is quite difficult and search helps the users find it. (Duracell and Fantastic 4 promotion). Old Spice example is similar. A non indexable site that uses Paid search to close the gap.
-- Inverse/brand response. Consumer is seeking out a brand, how do you respond to their search? Example: Duracell. Offer a Brand finder on the site. Example: Gillette. A few months ago a search for Gillette was a “boycott Gillette” that ranked #2.
- Be relevant – know your consumer and what they are asking
* Use internal search engine to see what visitors are searching for. Are you responding to what they are searching for?
-- Are you looking at which keywords your visitors used to come to your site?
-- Are you allowing them to use natural language?
-- What are they looking for? What are they finding?
-- Use the data to answer their questions.
-- Use the Funnel!!

Search in the Interactive Marketing Strategy
- Understand which role search is playing in your strategy
- Listen to your consumer
- Optimize your investment

This Search Engine Strategies Latino 2007 Keynote has been brought to us by Li Evans. Thanks, Li!

Keynote Conversation – SES Latino 2007, Monday June 18, 2007

* Gonzalo Alonso, General Manager for Spanish-Speaking Latin America, Google
* Nacho Hernandez, iHisapnic

Nacho greets and welcomes the audience. He mentions that this is the 2nd SES Latino event and the event room nearly full, people standing in the back. Nacho explains about Gonzalo's history with Google and that he started at Google in 2005, 2007 became manager for all of Google's efforts in Latin America.

Nacho then points out that its not about making more money for your campaigns, but to provide that user that service, product or information you put out there. That's what search is all about - searchers looking and you providing.

NH=Nacho Hernandez
GA: Gonzalo Alonso

NH: What do you see is the big difference between US and Latin America?
GA: First we see Latin America there is a lot of growth. Why Latin America? Growing faster
than the us, most of erope and places in Asia. Not only Spanish speaking but Portuguese. In the last 12 months, Latin America has become a #1 proioty for Google.

NH: Why put Google's Latin American base in Argentina?
GA: Meat and wine. (Audience chuckles). Data and numbers (hard bucket) and soft bucket - what we see around the Latin American community particularly in Argentins is a great talent pool, the place is very special, ecommerce is booming. Argentina is a place where everything is happening.

NH: Major markets in Latin American are Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Which others are high potential?
GA: Columbia, is starting to get a nation wide plan for technology. There's critical mass, and advertising dollars. Chile, as well.

NH: Chicken and egg factor. Lower internet penetration. What do you think could happen in Latin America to increase the internet penetration. Is it the 100 dollar computer the solution?
GA: In my opinion, 100 computers are cell phones in Latin America. But it is a very difficult ecosystem. It's more about how do you get the money from people - both advertisers, and buyers. Its all customers so we are looking into how to do this. E-commerce players are needed. Replicate what's happening in Brazil to the other countries.

Google just launched "business adwords" for Latin America. Create your own business website with us - and you can start your advertising

Governments need to find ways to close the digital gap. Google wants to help - but they need programs to help with. Participation from the whole ecosystem is needed.

NH: Is Search Marketing is going to grow much bigger when the chicken and egg situation is resolved?
GA: Absolutely. We're starting to notice airlines getting into the marketing. if we don't grow the ecosystem, e-commerce, it will be tough.

NH: What major shifts are you looking at from the big spenders in Latin America?
GA: There are 2-3 important components. More SEO in the right way will help. 2nd thing is that we are seeing a shift in companies. We are speaking more with the business guys - the ones who really need to sell. Branding side, Google is doing things with you tube, banners and display are starting to kick off. it's a tough journey.

NH: Businesses want to spend more money, but what about the content. Google just launched Universal Search, which is adding different elements of content from the vertical engines. If that's been implemented globally how does that affect Latin America, since there is a lack of content?
GA: Envision the web like an ocean, there's deep with no light, and then shallow with a lot of light. This is the way we see the web. The deep waters are really deep, just designed pages, not optimized. Why are there still a lot of content results come in English - it's not about building the web page, but building the right web page. Lots of content not optimized.

The problem on the other side, the platform are built, but content is lacking. Everyone in Search in Latin America market everyone is seeing this.

NH: Any other thoughts?
GA: Research - come to the industry if you have any cool ideas. Latin American Governments aren't doing it, so we as an industry need to partner to do this and do it really fast.

NH: Thanks you very much Gonzolas.

Liana “Li” Evans is the Search Marketing Manager for Commerce360 and oversees the search engine optimization, social media and word of mouth marketing efforts for their client’s search marketing efforts. Li also is the owner and editor of Search Marketing Gurus blog.

Landscape & Tactics Track
Tapping into US Hispanics & Latin Americans via Search
Moderator: Nacho Hernandez

First Speaker: Emerson Calegaretti, VP Client Development, Latin America, Acronym Media. Emerson is based in Brazil.

It’s amazing the audience is double what we had last year! Congratulations to Nacho for doing such a great job.

Latin America (Snapshot of Region)

• Population: 549 million
• Trade Balance 2006
-- US$ 514 billion exports
-- US$ 432 billion imports
-- US$ 82 billion balance (superavit)
• GDP: US$ 2.6 trillion (2006)
• Per capita income: US$ 9,238
• 11 million registered corporations

It’s good to have numbers like these to justify expanding into the Latin American market.

Internet Users in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico

Country/ Population/ Internet Users/ Penetration
Argentina 38 MM 10 MM 26%
Brazil 184 MM 32 MM 17%
Mexico 105 MM 19 MM 18%

Latin American Search Engine Industry

The major players are already there… Microsoft has been there for a long time, Yahoo as well and Google just started like 2 years ago. The important thing here is that they have local offices with local voices and are a presence there. This expansion is going to grow as well. More and more companies are seeing the value of the local presence and will be entering the market.

Google has 72% of the share of the searches in Latin America. Yahoo has 17% and MSN has 2%. The local search players are taking about 9% of the search. So when you’re thinking about expanding your search campaigns, make sure you remember the local players as they’re taking almost 10%of the market share right now.

Most active industries in SEM:
• Retail
• Local (Classifieds)
• Travel
• Finance
• Automotive

The YP and the classifieds for the local newspapers are really picking up in terms of catching up with the retail. Travel is booming... there are many local players who are growing a lot.

Compared to the US, the CPC in Brazil and Mexico, etc is very low.

Latin American SEM Advertisers

Advertiser base will grow almost 5xs in just 4 years.
2006 – 22,000 advertisers
2010 – 100,000 advertisers projected

Who are the advertisers in the Latin American SE Industry

Sales Channel Avg Monthly Ticket Category
Direct & Ad Agencies $10,000 Large
TeleSales $1,000 Medium
Online $200 Small
Resellers $10 Micro

The micro category contains very small, sole proprietorship type of single person businesses who are buying their online ads via resellers like the yellow pages, etc.

If you need the numbers, you can email Emerson at emerson@acronym.com

Second Speaker: Jack Flanagan, Exec VP of ComScore

What I’d like to do is talk about search as it’s related to Latin America and the Hispanic Market.

650 million searches Worldwide
Asia Pacific has highest contribution at 35%
Latin America has 7% & US Hispanic 2%

Latin America ranks #2 year over year
- 16% growth to 45.3 million unique visitors
US Hispanic growth – 5% year over year

89% of US Hispanic online population searches
Highest compared to other worldwide regions

US Hispanic market has highest search penetration. 89% of the users use the SEs.

The US Hispanics tend to skew much younger with smaller households and roughly half (49%) speak Spanish fluently.

Hispanics online are more usage intensive than the US General Market

Avg pages per usage day – 25% more pages viewed
Avg minutes per usage day – 20% more time online

US lags considerably behind all other countries in terms of engagement. France is #1, but Brazil, Argentina and Mexico are #2, 3 and 4.

Key findings

- While trailing other countries & regions in overall audience
- Latin America countries & US Hispanic audiences deliver a highly penetrated & growing audience in the area of search
- For US Hispanic, desirable & young demographics that are extremely advantageous for advertisers

Speaker Three: Sarah Carberry, Sales & Marketing Multicultural Development Manager, Google, Inc.

“Search Marketing to US Hispanics”

We’re seeing that US Hispanics are coming to Google wanting more personalization, more engagement, etc. Last year I presented a lot of heavy research, so this year I wanted to give you best practices, some search methods, and some best practices.

US Hispanics are surfing online more than watching TV. They’re using the internet more than 17 hours per week, and more than half the time on Spanish sites. More than half of Latino Adults prefer Spanish == 7.1 million.

70% of the growth in the US Hispanic market happened with the introduction/availability of broadband.

Searching in Spanish is on the Rise. The search volume is increasing over the past 3 years (see Google Trends for terms like futbol, recetas, noticias for examples).
Consumer Pathways are Non-Linear. Consumers leave footprints all over the place. They go to forums, they go to blogs, and they want first hand info from early adopters. They aren’t just going to the TV to get their information.

Search and Display work together to drive sales. When used in combination, the activations/conversions exponentially increase.

Offline exposure impacts online searching. Tying all of your offline components and offline awareness building into your online presence will help grab those qualified searchers and drive searches for your product/brand.

61% of US Hispanics own cell phones. Mobile searching, and therefore advertising, is on the rise.

Best Practices
- Keep it simple.
- Dynamic keyword insertion works well
- Experiment with language in the creative
- Develop geo-targeting campaigns
- Opt into the content network to increase your impressions and clicks.

Leverage 100% of your products and services. Make them findable.

Final Speaker: Rafael Jimenez, General Manager, Advertiser & Publisher Group, Yahoo! Hispanic Americas

I’d like to talk to you about certain things that we feel are coming in the next months and also about combining some concepts for best results.

Social search has had huge success in the region. There have been 20 million users in the region in less than a year. The good thing about social search is that you’re leveraging the knowledge of the collective, rather than relying solely on the machines. A lot of people are looking at alternative ways to find the answers they’re looking for on the web,

Mobile… approaching 250 million cell phone users in the region; 45% penetration.
- Mobile data plans are getting cheaper – driving increased usage of mobile web.
- Awareness is increasing – Mobile users are accessing the internet on their mobile devices.
- Increase in mobile content/applications – Yahoo! Go and oneSearch are good examples of mobile specific applications.
- Cellular networks are getting faster.

The New Advertising Platform
- System stability, extensibility, speed to innovation
- Timing: Code complete

New Advertising Interface
- Makes it easier to sign-up, manage and optimize your campaigns.
- Timing: Launched in US and Canada on 10/17/06; International began launching market-by-market in Q2 2007

Taking advantage of social search… Yahoo is integrating the experience of regular search with social search. We’re leveraging our user generated content within our search results to enhance the quality and value of the results. So you have the ability to tap into both of these types of searches.

While Barry and I are in our offices in New York, Dave Rohrer and Carolyn Shelby are doing SES Latino Conference reporting for us, which is happening right now in Miami, FL. Here are Dave's liveblogged notes for the first session:

Fundamentals Track
Introduction To Search Engine Marketing
Who are the major search engines? How can their editorial listings send you "natural" or "organic" traffic for free through search engine public relations or search engine optimization efforts? How can you purchase top rankings or placement through search engine advertising opportunities? This must-attend session for beginners provides an overview of key concepts.

Moderator:
* Jessie Stricchiola, Founder, Alchemist Media Inc.

Speaker:
* Mike Grehan, Vice President, International Business Development, Bruce Clay, Inc.

Jesse does the introduction, I (daver) am the only person that was here the first year.

Jessie Stricchiloa, Founder, Alchemist Media, Inc.
Mike Grehan, VP of International Business Development for Bruce Clay starts:

Has been around since 1995 and looked to SEO for his business.

4Ps of online marketing – Positioning, Permission, Partnership and Performance.
Search is not a cure for all. It works best when in a Mix.

Positioning – using paid and organic search to drive traffic
Permission – opening a dialogue with potential new customers. Customer relation management. References Seth Godin and his books.
Partnership – Affiliate marketing, co-promotion and joint venture. Everything you do offline you can do online. Ex: coupons, charity
Performance – Measuring the success of your web site and online marketing strategies. Use of analytics.

Growth of Online Marketing
- Newer channels such as search engine marketing are changing the marketing landscape.
- CPA – Direct mail is near 10$ and search is .29$

Plotted History of Search: Brian Pinkerton – Web Crawler, Daivd and Jerry – Yahoo, Louis Monier – Alta Vista, Larry and Sergei – Google, Apostolos Gerasoulis – Ask (Teoma), Bill Gates – MSN

Two Types: Organic and Sponsored Listings

Ways to get indexed – Organic, Pay per click, Cost per click, Pay for consideration – back in 1999 Yahoo started as a directory and you had to pay i.e. pay for consideration, Pay for inclusion, Trusted feed – XML feeds that Yahoo only uses.

Taxonomy of Search

Navigational – I want to be somewhere. At Google a navigational search example is “bbc” where its hard to sell.
Informational – classic information retrieval. An example is “history of cookies”, no ads, its non commercial. 70-80% of searches are non commercial.
Transactional – beginning of the buying cycle. Search for “ipod 80 gig black” and paid results and organic results both show up. Froogle has listings at the top as well.

Whos number one? Local/Vertical/General/ Paid
Searches can show all, so which one is #1.

Google Universal

Google Base – ways to feed Google information.
Go to Google Maps and update the info and you can increase the information that Google displays about your company.

Ask.com
2 weeks ago Ask rolled out their new search. They can move faster then Google and take risks so expect more.

Marketing Analogy
Organic results are a bit like doing PR i.e. free editorial coverage in press, radio and tv.

Major Players
Google , Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com

How search engines work
Search engines look at the world as a graph. There are two sides to organic: getting indexed and then ranking.

Preparing a Campaign
- Who are we?
- What do we do?
- What are we known for?
- What’s our message?

Then list the top 10 phrases which cover the content of your website. Each phrase should be two words ore more. Talk to people OUTSIDE of the organization.

You have to think about what people are actually looking for. Why optimize for digital camera? Does the user want to buy, sell, repair, shop? Go for longer keywords.

Keyword Analyzer – interesting tool that runs on your desktop.

Its non linear. Search engines don’t start at the home page, it comes in from every direction. Don’t build your site in that way, build it thinking that search engines grab and show a page, not your entire site.

Inverted Index – words point at pages. Think of it as an index in the back of the book. In a medical book you look up Hemoglobin, and look it up in the back of the book. Each term will have a listing of all the pages that a word appears on.

The goal: write a page that the search engines like and that makes sense to a user. Write a page in a Newspaper style. Have the keyword in the title, in the headline, in the copy, in the alt tags of the image, and then text links and/or link to the sitemap.

Meta tags – came from library science but are very poor for heterogeneous corpus/collection with no standard/control.
Search engines don’t even believe your metatags or your content. Why should they? Links are what they believe. Social network analysis = link popularity. Not all links are equal. A link to your website from me, is a vote for you. It means that I think my visitors should look at your site.

The Dark Side:
Cloaking, invisible text, tiny text, keyword stuffing, fake links, over submitting and so on. See Google’s webmaster guidelines for a list of things not to do.

Paid Search:
Goto.com – started paid search.
Paid is about conversion, its not about eyeballs. Web Analytics – measure ROI, A/B Testing, Google Optimizer.

Demographic Targeting:
Google has the larger user base but not the larger subscriber base. MSN and Yahoo both have about 150 million users that login and use services.

Excellent Resource:
Bill Hunt – Search Engine Marketing, Inc
Bryan Eisenberg – Call to Action, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark

Q&A

Q: Once you get #1 in Organic and in Paid, which one is worth more?
A: Mike: people tend to click on the left, they don’t know why but studies say they just tend to click on the left. Jesse: some studies do show if you are #1 in organic and paid it creates a better sense of brand.

Q: Ranking without being crawled?
A: It is possible, and Ive seen it frequently. The reason for that is it will crawl the billions and billions of links and lots are on the frontier of the crawl. Google looks at the links to a new page and you become #1. If the page is new and it’s a new term it can happen. You can tell as just the bare URL is shown.

Q: The perfect page, don’t you get banned for extensive use of a keyword?
A: You would expect to see it in the title, headline and body. There are people that user keyword density tools and set every page to a certain %. Don’t do this, search engines will figure out what you are doing.

Q: The frequency that you change your content, does it effect the frequency the visits of a Google bot and of your ranking.
A: Google and others have News Bots, Fresh Bots, and so on. Bigger sites get crawled sometimes every 5 minutes. Blogs get crawled more often as they get updated and if they have the linkage data. If your link data is normal, you could update all day long and not see a difference in the # of crawls. If you are writing lots of content and not seeing an up tick in crawling take a look at Google’s Webmaster Central. You can get a lot of data about your site.

In a Google Groups thread, a member has set up a subdomain on a domain and has duplicate content on the main domain:

in a nutshell, domainB.domainA.com and domainB.com is pointing to the same content

To avoid duplicate content issues, he's looking for a way to implement the robots.txt file so that the subdomain (domainB.domainA.com) is not indexed by Google, but that the main domain itself (domainA.com) is still indexed.

Bergy, one of Google's newest Webmaster Central representatives, offers some insights.

When a spider finds a URL, it takes the whole domain name (everything between 'http://' and the next '/'), then sticks a '/robots.txt' on the end of it and looks for that file. If that file exists, then the spider should read it to see where it is allowed to crawl.

In your case, Googlebot, or any other spider, should try to access three URLs: domainA.com/robots.txt, domainB.domainA.com/robots.txt, and domainB.com/robots.txt. The rules in each are treated as separate, so disallowing robots from domainA.com/ should result in domainA.com/ being removed from search results while domainB.domainA.com/ remains unaffected, which does not sound like not something you want.

When in doubt, Bergy suggests that you use the Google robots.txt Analysis Tool to see if robots.txt is doing what the webmasters would typically expect.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

When you name images so that they can show up in image search, what's your preference? What do you think is the best naming convention of the three below?

• actress-name-sexy-pic
• actress_name_sexy_pic
• actressnamesexypic

That is the question at Search Engine Watch Forums.

The advice posed asks the particular individual to go to an image search (e.g. Google Image Search) and see the naming convention for particular image search results.

Marcia also says that she's tried both hyphens and underscores and both seem to work well for her.

Underscores or hyphens both work. I use hyphens for filenames and underscores for images just out of habit, I've done it for so long.

The thread also takes a small tangent. Be careful when naming photos. In the particular thread, adding descriptions or adjectives such as "sexypic" might imply that the site is not "kid friendly."

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

While some people think that governmental websites have higher authority than a .com or other TLD, the debate is still ongoing. This question, now, is whether .gov sites should automatically be indexed in Google, of if they should wait until the trust is passed to the domain. A Cre8asite Forums thread points to a Google Groups thread about why a particular .gov site, which has been submitted to Google, has not yet been indexed.

In the Google Groups thread, the .gov webmaster is having a tough time understanding the Google policies about how the number and quality of inbound links helps sites get discovered.

For a small state gov't. program site directed at a small percentage of the population with few inbound links currently, that can be a problem. So, people who need to find this program must wait for "good" links? Functionality dictates service to citizens?

JohnMu puts it in perspective for the webmaster. It does need numerous quality links so that Google (and its users) understand its importance.

If the program is good, it will get links and then it will get indexed. If it does not get links, chances are nobody is interested in finding it either :-)

Over at Cre8asite Forums, the discussion continues. Moderator joedolson believes that giving preference could mean spam, spam, and more spam.

If .gov sites could also be given free (and foolproof) security checks to verify against hacking and spamming, sure - give 'em preference. Otherwise, I think you're just opening up for problems.

Similarly, moderator EGOL believes that everyone needs to earn their rankings and that having a .gov TLD does not automatically mean that they deserve preferential treatment by the search engines:

I spent one of my careers as a manager at a government agency... if they want visibility they need to earn it just like anyone else. If they want newspaper or TV or radio exposure they figure it out and pay the freight... why should the web be any different?

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums and Google Groups.

Yesterday was Father's Day and some of the search engines sported new logos for the special day.

Google had:

Dogpile had:

Yahoo had flash:

And here at the Search Engine Roundtable:

Ask.com did not have a logo for the day, which is not like them, but maybe it has to do with their new interface?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Google Pay Per Action has been having limit beta testing since March 21st. Advertisers who have access to create ppa ads, want more publishers to offer them.

A WebmasterWorld thread has the same tone. They simply want to be able to test these types of ads at a higher volume.

This is just as we said back in mid-April, the ads need more face time.

The main issue on the publisher side, as I see it, is that it is hard to find, locate and implement the ads on your site. They have updated the AdSense side of things recently, to make it a bit easier. Here is the workflow:

Browse Categories:

Select Advertiser or Category:

Select Ad:

This case above, the "text link" unit is not available for this advertiser. So, I went backwards, and selected the whole computers category. Google should now rotate a computer related text link unit after this word, .

How do we get publishers to add more of these on their pages? How do we get advertisers to see the true value to PPA, if any?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Danny called out Google for indexing their own product search results on April 30th. Since then Google updated their robots.txt file to include an exclusion of /products?.

A German forum, ABAKUS Forum (remember Alan Webb?) spotted Google displaying Google Product results for the search term wireless router.

The result is on the first page, 9th result:

As you can see, there is very little information indexed for this result. But I assume the linkage data has pushed it to the first page of the results.

Hat tip to Stefan for spotting this and sending it to me. Forum discussion at ABAKUS German Forum.

This may be considered a continuation of the June 2007 Google Update but it has now been given a name. The Buffy update, as it is now called out of respect for Vanessa Fox leaving Google, is currently underway.

Yes, Friday we reported a Google Webmaster Link Tool June 2007 Update but we now have a more detailed thread at WebmasterWorld describing major search results changes at Google.com.

WebmasterWorld Admin explains:

Ever since Update Jagger, which prepared the way for Google's new Big Daddy infrastructure, the changes and shifts to the SERPs come so frequently that we haven't called an Update in over a year. Instead, we've been trying to watch the SERP changes in an ongoing, monthly thread that shifts with the irregular roll, pitch and yaw of the good ship Google.

But something quite major is now going on with the Google SERPs. Members are reporting major changes in the single word search results, most particularly, but lots of other things are stirred up as well. On one of my single keywords, I've just passed wikipedia (yeah!) and jdMorgan reported the same for one of his keywords.

So it's time -- we are officially declaring Update Buffy. We'll begin with recent posts from our June SERPs Watching thread. What do you see going on?

So why name it Buffy? Let's say it's in honor of someone who just left her job but knows a whole lot about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We've never gone with someone's formal name for an update. Tip of the hat to reseller, goodroi, and jdmorgan for their input.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Earlier this week, we reported that Yahoo was experimenting with a blue header for their search interface. I just did a search at Yahoo and I see a purple header being tested.

Here is a screen capture:

Clicking on the "options" button on the right, opens a menu with "advanced search," "preferences," "advertising program," and "about this page." Those links also appear on the normal Yahoo! Search interface.

The Yahoo! Search home page remains to be the same white background and same user interface for me.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

After a cloudy week, it's sunnier and breezier out today. Looks like this weekend will be quite nice. But before you go anywhere, let's recap what happened in the world of search this week.

First, some milestones:

Search Engine Watch Turns 10

Last weekend, Search Engine Watch celebrated its 10th birthday. Danny covered the history of Search Engine Watch on Search Engine Land, and it's amazing how he created an incredible resource and reflects on its growth. I wish I were around for those years, but I'm glad I'm in the space now.

Kim Krause Berg Joins SiteLogic

Our contributing author Kim Krause Berg has joined Matt Bailey at SiteLogic. She will be doing consulting on a long-term project but her blog and forums will remain the same. Again, congratulations, Kim!

And now, conferences:

High Rankings Seminar

Today is the last day that you can get a discount for signing up through Search Engine Roundtable for the High Rankings Seminar to be held on June 28 and 29th in Denver, Colorado. Jill Whalen, who is running the event, has a great team of speakers lined up. It should be good!

Search Engine Strategies Toronto

We thought we had coverage for SES Toronto 2007, but unfortunately, it didn't work out for us as our conference correspondent didn't make it to Toronto after all. To those who attended: how was it?

On the note of the Search Engine Strategies conference series, the future of SES is discussed in the forums this week. What would you like to see? I encourage everyone who has feedback to join the discussion.

And back to our regularly scheduled announcements:

Vanessa Fox Leaves Google, Susan Moskwa Joins the Webmaster Central Team

Vanessa Fox has left Google and has moved to to Zillow. I've known Vanessa for just a few months but she's been very personable and approachable, and Zillow is quite lucky to have her. Congratulations to Vanessa.

The newest addition to the Google Webmaster Central team is Susan Moskwa, who just so happens to be a very cool person who I was happy to meet at both SES NY and SMX. Susan, congrats to you as well. :)

Other Google Webmaster Central News

There have been many developments with Google Webmaster Central lately. The interface has been cleaned up and you can now report paid links easily using the paid link report tool.

Google AdWords IP Banning, Google AdSense Allows Specific Sites

Google AdWords now allows you to ban IPs from clicking on your ads. That way, if you know your competitors are clicking on those ads, you can filter them out so that you're not paying for a click that won't yield to any conversions. This should be huge.

Additionally, Google is allowing AdSense publishers to specify which sites are allowed to display AdSense ads with their publisher IDs.

Google Enhanced Custom Search Engine

This week, Google has launched an enhanced custom search engine that enables Google to search sites that link from the page that the search engine code is stored. This should come in handy for sites with blogrolls (similar subjects) and especially directories.

Google and eBay at Odds

Google and eBay have run into a cat and mouse game where Google apparently tried to hold an event near an eBay party in Boston to persuade users to switch to Google Checkout. eBay has responded by pulling their ads from Google AdWords. It's gotten pretty messy, as John Battelle has pointed out.

Yahoo Defends Company, Ask.com Confused with Google

In small or big news (however you see it) this week, Yahoo's performance has been challenged by investors. The company is seemingly in growing pains, but it's evident that Terry Semel is getting used to the fact that Google has clearly moved ahead. Yahoo still has promise, and there just so happen to be people who would rather use Yahoo than Google, so it's quite possible that Yahoo can be victorious as long as those growing pains go away.

The Ask.com campaign is confusing a number of users who think it's actually a Google marketing tactic. After the story hit the Digg frontpage, a number of Digg users felt this was a Google marketing campaign. The Ask.com domain is just not very apparent in these commercials and ads.

Weekend Plans?

It should be a nice weekend, and on Sunday, it's father's day! Happy Father's Day, guys! Make sure you check out Search Engine Roundtable on Sunday to see our pretty theme that our graphic designer, Skew, has been working on!

In a Google Groups thread, AdWords API Advisor informs developers about a new feature available to the public: IncludeZeroImpression has been taken out of beta and has now been made available to all developers and should work in all versions of the API.

AdWords API Advisor offers the following words of caution:

Please note that very large reports that include zero impression rows may fail (indicated by error code 112). If your report fails as a result of enabling this option, try breaking subsequent reports down into smaller queries/reports.

We are working to make this a more scalable solution. However, we (and several of you) felt it was important to expose this feature now despite this issue. We will notify you when scalability enhancements are released.

This feature is located in the KeywordReportJob and CustomReportJob.

Users are welcoming this addition to enhance their tools.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

A Threadwatch thread points to an Australian Search Marketing website that is seemingly indexing content from many SEO/SEM informational websites.

Todd Mintz, who discovered this, says that this site is creating confusion as Google is indexing the content as if it's located on this website rather than the original sources (Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land, etc.):

But, this isn't a passive directory that's passing high PR links to us...they are allowing my / our stories to be indexed in Google as being on their website (my story in question was viewed over 400 times).

I find it a bit curious that a government agency has created a splog-like database directory with little value and no original content. I find it a bit offensive that they are indexing my / our content as theirs. Some of the links redirect automatically to the proper page and some of the links take you to the government site from which you have to click thru to the original story.

What do you suggest should be done?

Forum discussion at Threadwatch.

Yahoo! has hit its "teenage years," according to a L.A. Times article (subscription required). But investors are bothered the "growing pains."

Yahoo Chief Executive Terry Semel presided over the company's annual shareholder meeting here, emphasizing the positives but acknowledging missed business opportunities.

It appears that Terry Semel, Yahoo's chief executive, is getting used to the fact that he's #2 behind Google. Last year, an investor says, he was more "combative... He was really angry about people comparing Yahoo to Google then."

A WebmasterWorld discusses the article and Yahoo's predicament in greater detail.

The growing pains? One member says: "Like a parent pulling the sheet over their eyes!" Puberty is a frustrating thing.

What is Yahoo here for? Another member wonders:

What bothers me about Yahoo is that I'm not exactly sure what they're for.

Google is a search engine with spin-off businesses, but Yahoo's core directory has effectively been abandoned, so there's not really anything familiar or obviously useful about the yahoo.com homepage.

Others believe there is promise for Yahoo:

I use yahoo a lot, and I get a lot off traffic from them too,

So, I for one hope they do better, and raise their game

Go Yahoo!

Furthermore, a few members are frustrated with Google and want to focus their energy on Yahoo. They hope that things improve for the company.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Google just released a new feature for AdWords advertisers. Advertisers can now specify if they do not want their ads to show up for specific IP addresses.

Why is this useful? A few reasons. Let's say you know a competitor is clicking on your ads, you can block their IP address and they won't even see your ad. Even if they are not clicking on your ads, you may not want them to see your ads, so you can also prevent that. Another reason is if you search for your keywords a lot but don't click on your own ads, and you do not want it to impact your click through rate, you can also block your own IP address from seeing your own ads.

How do you see it? Go to tools and then click on IP Exclusion, then select a campaign and there you go.

You should see this:

The AdWords help section adds that you can block up to twenty IP addresses or ranges of addresses, per campaign. "All ads in the campaign are prevented from showing for users with the IP addresses you specify, so we recommend you choose your list carefully."

Of course, if people are using dynamic IP addresses, this may get a bit tricky.

Finally, "Note: You may still receive some impressions and clicks from excluded IP addresses if a Google Network site doesn't provide users' IP information."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

With Danny Sullivan's departure from Search Engine Watch and the Search Engine Strategies conference series, the future of the Search Engine Strategies conference is something that many people wonder about. Kevin Newcomb, news editor at Search Engine Watch, has posted in the Search Engine Watch Forums with an update to past and future participants. Kevin Ryan has been brought in to oversee the conference series, and Incisive Media is in the process of creating an advisory board for the conferences that will be comprised of search industry professionals. Kevin also solicits feedback from the community to guide the future of the Search Engine Strategies conferences.

Forum members are looking for smaller conferences, for one:

One of the great things about SMX, in addition to it being geared towards advanced SEMs, was its small size attendee-wise. While there are many good things about a bigger conference (a great expo floor, for one), one of the things that's hard to do at SES is break into the "groups," so to speak. It's hard to chat with speakers, because they're mobbed after every session, at lunch, in the bar, etc.

Printed notes, albeit old fashioned, could be extremely useful to some (and I agree!)

Bring back the printed presentations and hold speakers accountable for providing something for the book, even if it's not the final version. I have all my books w/notes dating back to Boston 2002. The notes from NYC just don't provide the same value without the data and charts found in the presentaitons.

Of course, looking for more advanced tracks -- like addressing the new Google Universal Search -- is also something that people are seeking out.

Maybe a "Universal Search" track would be a good idea! Helping folks understand more about how widgets, maps, xml/rss, images, audio and video aid with SEM/SEO.

That's the feedback so far. Does anyone have anything else? Join the discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google has confirmed in a WebmasterWorld thread that they are testing a new feature that will give publishers the ability to specify which sites are allowed to display AdSense ads with their publisher IDs.

The "Allowed Sites" option a new feature that is being tested on a limited number of accounts. The allowed sites section shows you a list of "unauthorized sites that have displayed ads using your AdSense publisher ID within the last week."

It then gives you the option to "Allow any site to show ads for my account" or "Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account."

I thought this might have been the site authentication feature that AdSense has been testing for a year plus now. But I was wrong. AdSenseAdvisor said:

We're starting to test a new feature that would let publishers choose between allowing any site to display ads with their pub-ID (no change from the current system), and authorizing only a specific list of sites to display their ads. This is separate from the existing Site Authentication feature.

The team thinks this'll help address a number of issues we've heard feedback on, and we hope to release it to all publishers if the testing goes smoothly.

Why is this exciting for AdSense publishers? Well, right now, technically, anyone can copy and paste your AdSense code on any site, even if you do not own or manage that site. And as we know, the AdSense TOS does not allow all sites to include AdSense and some publishers can be banned if they do not comply. This feature allows AdSense publishers to control that - by saying, I only approve specific sites.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google has updated Google Webmaster Tools with a link update and I suppose other data updates as well.

There is currently discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and two threads at WebmasterWorld.

Here is a look at our top pages, by links reported via Google Webmaster Tools:

For the past updates see:

• April 2007 Google Linkage Data
• March 2007 Google Linkage Data
• February 2007 Google Linkage Data

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and two threads at WebmasterWorld.

Soon after I wrote Google Says They Treat Small Publishers As They Treat Large Publishers a new thread at DigitalPoint Forums says the same thing.

The thread has several AdSense publishers claiming that Google has been very proactive about possible Google AdSense terms of service (TOS) issues on their site. Google has reached out to these publishers, adjusted their earnings, but did not ban them for these violations.

Well, I had my first run-in in 2 years after putting Google ads on a page/URL that contained a "Google Brand" (wasn't aware there was such a policy) and my experience was different from what I've read.

Google actually advised me about the violation without banning my account and politely replied my email within 24 hours.

One other publisher said:

I agree, I just posted a thread last week about some invalid clicks on my account. Google replied to my email quickly and did not ban me, they just adjusted the payment. This was fair because I do not want to cheat honest advertisers when someone click bombed me. It restored my faith in Google and makes me wonder about those who claim to be banned for no reason and no fault of their own.

I love seeing these types of threads, because there are so many other threads saying the opposite. You know what they say. Most people are only vocal when they have something to complain about.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

By now, I am sure many of you heard the news that Vanessa Fox, the face behind Google Webmaster Central, is leaving Google for Zillow. If you haven't read the various blog posts from the search community on the news, you can via Techmeme, or here is a brief listing for you:

• Search Engine Watch Blog
• Search Engine Land
• WebProNews
• Web Metrics Guru
• Marketing Pilgrim
• SEOmoz
• Matt Cutts
• DaveN

Vanessa has done a ton for the SEO and Webmaster community. I know she had a team behind her, and she stressed that before her announcement with Expanding the webmaster central team at Webmaster Central Blog. We also covered it before over here. Is Vanessa replaceable? Nah. But can someone come in and be as helpful and useful towards the Webmasters cause? I think so.

I wanted to publicly thank Vanessa for all her work bridging the Webmaster community with Google. I also wanted to wish Vanessa the best of luck and success at Zillow. We are all backing you!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Google Groups.

Have any SEOs in the house ever run into a problem with a potential client where the SEO is asked for a position guarantee -- satisfaction, or your money back? I'm sure it's happened to some people, and it is currently happening to a member at the High Rankings Forum. What do you do?

Well, for one, focus on conversions. Traffic is one thing, but if it doesn't convert to sales, it will probably have no value to the client. A lot of people look for increased traffic, but they should focus on better rankings, as moderator torka says. Her suggestions?

1. Show your potential client results you achieved from other websites.
2. Don't focus on a specific percentage. You can't control it.
3. Watch out for your guarantees. If you're offering a money-back guarantee and you don't deliver, you owe your customer a refund.

Member MartinC has this to add:

The point to remember is that getting there takes time and effort, so if you are going to be judged/paid on performance you will have to take all the risk and you will also have to make sure that you are going to get paid for your efforts if you do achieve the goals and make sure that they are going to follow all your advice.

I always take the view that it is better to be upfront and temper peoples unrealistic expectations. I find that most of the time I can explain it in a way that gives them the confidence that I know what I'm talking about and for those that don't I don't really want to work with them. It is useful to relate the Internet to a city, people don't expect to open a shop and within a few days appear on the most prestigious retail street rubbing shoulders with well established brands and outlets, in that respect it is a myth that the Internet is a level playing field.

Forum discussion continues at the High Rankings Forum.

Yesterday, the Google Custom Search Engine blog announced a pretty cool addition to the Google Custom Search engine family: the ability to integrate Google Custom Search onto your page which will search all pages that you've linked to.

You can now create a CSE by simply placing a small piece of tailored code on a page on your site. With that one piece of code, Google's search technology will automatically include in your new CSE all of the sites you have linked to from that page, creating a dynamic, powerful and tailored search experience really quickly. Moreover, your new CSE will update itself periodically to include any new links added to that page.

Here's a screenshot of the image that Barry took when he wrote about this for Search Engine Land:

Now, web directories can be a lot more useful as well.

Forum discussion continues at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

As more and more companies acknowledge the importance of search engine optimization, they realize that having an in-house SEO is important. What should firms look for when they hire a full time SEO? A Search Engine Watch Forums thread discusses the job requirements.

• Must be able to show at least two successfully optimized sites
• Must be knowledgeable of SE algos and relevancy signals
• Must possess keen knowledge coding and the ability to optimize coding for SEO purposes (HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, mod_rewrites, 301/302 redirects)
• 5+ years of experience
• Skillsets: creativity, marketing, and technical
• Understanding of available SEO tools
• Must be a team player

What about salary? Is five years of experience really set in stone? As moderator Marcia adds, "it depends."

A lot depends on the needs of the particular business, and whether it's a one-man show or there's a team or a few individuals who work on the site. For an in-house position, there would be tremendous differences in different geographic areas, which is a factor to consider. Then again, there are SEOs who make well into six figures running their own sites who wouldn't think of going in-house.

It isn't only a matter of time, there are people out there who have been at it for many, many years but their abilities are still limited. Then, there are some who excel after only a year or so if they have a natural bent for it.

Very true. Some people show excellent promise earlier than others. As far as salaries go, it also varies. We have posted a list of Search Engine Marketing salaries in the past which might be a useful guide.

Discussion continues at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yesterday, I wrote how Is Ask.com's "The Algorithm" Campaign Really Working? I then submitting it to Digg, and it later became "popular". My goal was to see if Digg users were also confused by the campaign, as confused as my brother-in-law and as confused as some of the search marketers at Cre8asite Forums.

The discussion echoed the findings in the Cre8asite Forums. Many, unfortunately, are confused about how this marketing campaign promotes the awareness of their brand.

- 27 Digg Respondents (who actually associated the "algorithm" campaign with a brand)
- 20 associated "the algorithm" campaign with Google
- 6 associated it with Ask.com
- 1 associated it with eBay

Percentage of Digg Users Thought "The Algorithm" campaign was from:

It is important to note that campaigns like this need time to seed. It is probably Ask.com's goal to keep these campaigns going so that in the future, the seeds will sprout and The Algorithm will be considered Ask.com's. That seems to be the plan, but only time will tell. This also only reflects the Digg market and does not reflect normal people who work in schools, in doctor offices, legal offices and so on.

You can see additional comments at Digg and Cre8asite Forums.

Yahoo's site explorer tool is a great tool to check your links as well as competitor links. A WebmasterWorld notes something fairly clear to most users of the tool, that Yahoo! seems to order the links in order of some quality metric.

Let's take a look at the inlinks to the home page of this site. The links consist from the Official Google Blog, the Yahoo Search Blog, Techmeme, Search Engine Watch Blog, Search Engine Land, OakWebWorks.com (a weird one), Ask.com Blog, Search Engine Blog, and then more links from the Google Blog. As you dig deeper into the links, the order may not seem to be so apparent.

WebmasterWorld senior member, SteveB said, "Yeah, the first batch have always included the most valued or whatever. However, #750 seems definitely not prioritized over 50,000 other links."

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

eBay Pulls Google AdWords Ads To Protest Google Checkout Moves by Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land describes the recently cat and mouse game between Google and eBay. Let me summarize quickly.

(1) eBay is to hold eBay Live Event in Boston today.
(2) Google tries to crash eBay's party with a Google Checkout Freedom Party tonight near the eBay Live Event. Obviously, to persuade some PayPal users to switch from eBay to Google Checkout.
(3) eBay pulls Google AdWords ads as "an experiment," eBay spokesman Hani Durzy told ComputerWorld.com.
(4) Google cancels their Google Checkout Freedom Party, clearly due to the eBay situation. Google said," After speaking with officials at eBay, we at Google agreed that it was better for us not to feature this event during the eBay Live conference."

That is the story as it stands.

Now a search for buy baby now longer returns an eBay ad. eBay said they will be continuing their "experiment" even after Google cancelled their party. Yes, eBay had an ad for almost any search query on Google. That translated into huge dollars for Google. By the way, eBay ads are only pulled in the U.S.

There is a ton of coverage on this news and you can find a roundup at Techmeme.

A WebmasterWorld thread has feedback from Webmasters and Search Marketers.

Ogletree said:

I will be the first to say "Thank God". I am so sick of seeing the ebay ads. I wonder if they will just be replaced by affiliates.

Brent Tabke wonders:

More importantly, will eBay ban anyone mentioning g checkout on Ebay and will Google bury anyone that takes paypal? Film at eleven.

I cannot agree more with jcoronella:

The google protest party is in pretty bad taste. Very unlike them.. I wonder who actually approved it, and how long they will be in their position.

I think it is great to see this type of response from eBay. I think Google looked really bad afterwards. But in the long run, I think eBay is making a mistake by not officially accepting Google Checkout as a payment option on eBay. I know it is competitive, but these types of moves rarely work out in the long run.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

When Google released placement performance reports earlier this week, many were upset that Google did not break down the site by site detail within Google's own property.

For example, Google would show you the details of which site sent you what impressions, clicks, and conversions if it came from the AdSense network. But they do not show you the site by site detail from within their own network. Some examples include AdSense for domains, Gmail, and so on.

AdWordsRep has now responded saying that this will be coming soon.

Since our network is comprised of hundreds of thousands of sites and millions of pages, information reported in the Placement Performance report consists of vast amounts of data. To provide this information in a scalable way to all our advertisers as soon as possible with the full launch in June, we are providing reporting for certain segments of our network in a consolidated way.

This includes sites that are participating in our AdSense for domains and AdSense for error pages programs. We realize that advertisers would like to see site-by-site metrics for all segments of the content network to be able to effectively optimize their campaigns. For this reason, we are working on ways of providing this information on a site-by-site basis as soon as possible.

Would this complete the advertiser's needs?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

After we covered Google Maps Street view in our last Digg Digest, many more stories about privacy (and some funny pictures) have popped up on the Internet.

First, the silliness.

You can't see it anymore, because Google is removing Street View images due to privacy concerns, but I found the questionable image of the man peeing on the side of the road

There. Now you can't say I didn't show you.

In fact, it prompted people to make movies out of it.

Uh yeah, I'm not sure what he was doing. Really.

But anyway, all of this Google Maps Street View madness came out at the same time that Google was slammed for privacy concerns . However, not everyone agrees. Danny Sullivan, for example, thinks that the Privacy International report sucks . He points out a number of flaws with the Privacy International report, including the fact that one of its board members is an employee of Microsoft. And so, on the heels of this announcement, we see that Google will anonymize search results after eighteen months , which should also come as a relief to some of these Privacy International guys.

It's actually cool to see what search engines know about us, even if you're not inclined to actually take advanta